4 ms·

Curious: 10 million server requests per day sounds kind of impressive, until you actually do the math.. divided by how much physical iron they're using, that's

Curious: 10 million server requests per day sounds kind of impressive, until you actually do the math.. divided by how much physical iron they're using, that's a little less than 9 requests per second per server. It makes me wonder: if they were using something other than rails, would they need that much iron?

mechanical_fish 17y ago
How much development time can you afford to spend to save the cost of four or five servers? (You can't save the sixth server if you want your site to be up while the seventh one is rebooting or being replaced.) If the other comments are to be believed, this site was built by one person, working part-time, in four months. He can't afford to lavish time on unimportant problems, like desperately trying to conserve server resources that he could otherwise afford and that cost far less than a programmer's time is worth.
- warfangle 17y ago
  It was originally built by one guy in 4 months part time, but now (according to the article) there's a "small team." Of course, you're also totally throwing away the "new agile" platforms, like django, scala lift, and so forth.
  - sstrudeau 17y ago
    The "small team" is his wife and some community managers -- no other engineers or admins. He builds & runs the whole stack himself, and he has duties outside of the admin/development pieces of the business. So he's still essentially a part time developer/part time admin.
sophacles 17y ago
I strongly suspect a flaw in your statistics: I'm willing to put money on this site having a spikey workload, not a constant workload. There are probably hours in a row that 6 of those servers sit idle. Rant: I wish technical sites would stop using req/day as a metric. It leads to the op type of analysis. At the very least, such articles could use a format of "X req/day peaking at Y/s". Maybe if the NYT was writing it would be ok to use req/day but a sight who's tagline is: "High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites." should know better.
- warfangle 17y ago
  Rebuttal accepted, observed, and original post withdrawn.
- toddh 17y ago
  What should I use in a title that is informative and gets people interested enough to read an article? A munin graph isn't quite as punchy.
  - sophacles 17y ago
    Sorry for that late reply, IMO, that title was fine, it did it's job well. My rant, etc, was about the stats section in the article itself. It still uses a flat time model, on the scale of N things/day instead of a more representative N things/day (X things/(smaller than day time unit) at peak).
caseyf 17y ago
Hey there. 2.5 of our physical servers run Passenger/Rails. If this were a Java app, I definitely would have been able to get away with less (mostly because of less memory consumption, but less CPU consumption wouldn't hurt either) However, I'd probably still want 2 machines for redundancy.
- rogerdpack 17y ago
  if you want to save on RAM you can use a 32-bit OS and/or 1.9 or the MBARI patches--works well for me :) http://programming-gone-awry.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-save-much-ram-when-running-rails.html http://programming-gone-awry.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-sav...

mechanical_fish 17y ago

How much development time can you afford to spend to save the cost of four or five servers? (You can't save the sixth server if you want your site to be up while the seventh one is rebooting or being replaced.) If the other comments are to be believed, this site was built by one person, working part-time, in four months. He can't afford to lavish time on unimportant problems, like desperately trying to conserve server resources that he could otherwise afford and that cost far less than a programmer's time is worth.

warfangle 17y ago
It was originally built by one guy in 4 months part time, but now (according to the article) there's a "small team." Of course, you're also totally throwing away the "new agile" platforms, like django, scala lift, and so forth.
- sstrudeau 17y ago
  The "small team" is his wife and some community managers -- no other engineers or admins. He builds & runs the whole stack himself, and he has duties outside of the admin/development pieces of the business. So he's still essentially a part time developer/part time admin.

sophacles 17y ago

I strongly suspect a flaw in your statistics: I'm willing to put money on this site having a spikey workload, not a constant workload. There are probably hours in a row that 6 of those servers sit idle. Rant: I wish technical sites would stop using req/day as a metric. It leads to the op type of analysis. At the very least, such articles could use a format of "X req/day peaking at Y/s". Maybe if the NYT was writing it would be ok to use req/day but a sight who's tagline is: "High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites." should know better.

warfangle 17y ago
Rebuttal accepted, observed, and original post withdrawn.
toddh 17y ago
What should I use in a title that is informative and gets people interested enough to read an article? A munin graph isn't quite as punchy.
- sophacles 17y ago
  Sorry for that late reply, IMO, that title was fine, it did it's job well. My rant, etc, was about the stats section in the article itself. It still uses a flat time model, on the scale of N things/day instead of a more representative N things/day (X things/(smaller than day time unit) at peak).

caseyf 17y ago

Hey there. 2.5 of our physical servers run Passenger/Rails. If this were a Java app, I definitely would have been able to get away with less (mostly because of less memory consumption, but less CPU consumption wouldn't hurt either) However, I'd probably still want 2 machines for redundancy.

rogerdpack 17y ago
if you want to save on RAM you can use a 32-bit OS and/or 1.9 or the MBARI patches--works well for me :) http://programming-gone-awry.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-save-much-ram-when-running-rails.html http://programming-gone-awry.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-sav...