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I'm amazed that Github Pages ran on just two servers (well, aside from the MySQL clusters). That is absolutely incredible given the sheer amount of projects and

I'm amazed that Github Pages ran on just two servers (well, aside from the MySQL clusters). That is absolutely incredible given the sheer amount of projects and people who rely on it for their sites (me included!). I love the philosophy behind Pages of abstaining from over-engineering and sticking to the simple, proven solutions. It's a great service and I'm a massive fan.

vog 11y ago
In the same vein, I'm surprised how many static websites go down just because they appear on a news site.
- munificent 11y ago
  Most of those I see either: 1. Aren't static sites but are things like WordPress blogs running server-side PHP essentially unnecessarily. 2. Don't take down the server, but just hit the tiny bandwidth quota of some cheap shared hosting provider, so the host blocks it.
  - josephmx 11y ago
    A significant amount also seem to saturate their line, especially on photo-heavy static sites
  - mortehu 11y ago
    3. Use the distro's default Apache connection limit of 20, despite the server being able to handle thousands of concurrent connections. The limited connections are then quickly used by users with slow connections.
joshmoz 11y ago
It's cool that they were able to do this with two machines, and I don't want to detract from that, but it's probably worth pointing out that a "machine" is not a very useful unit of capacity. These two machines could be dual core i5s or they could be 20 core xeon boxes with hugely varying amounts of memory and storage. Too bad they don't clarify, I'm curious.
- ceequof 11y ago
  The fileserver tier consists of pairs of Dell R720s running in active/standby configuration. Each pair is largely similar to the single pair of machines that the old Pages infrastructure ran on. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-r720/pd http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-r720/pd Two Xeon E5-2600s per machine.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - ChiperSoft 11y ago
    The ES-2600 series comes in 4 to 12 cores, so that's still a pretty wide range of compute power.
vinhboy 11y ago
I am going to remember this article and bring it up every time some ops crazy people try to trick me into over-engineering shit.
- clinta 11y ago
  As an ops guy, I'm going to remember this article and use it as a talking point for the benefits of static pages when devs want to put everything into their dynamic framework of choice.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    It's a bit of a trade off... static generation of dynamic content isn't so much different from front-side caching, if the bulk of your requests can cache for 30+ minutes, you can setup some pretty decent caching rules on a couple of servers fronting a dynamic backend that doesn't need to be too big to support many requests. For the most part, the load tends to come down to less than optimized database storage and queries on the backend, often duplicated for every page load for content that could easily be offloaded to the client browser, constructed client-side, and requested on demand. It's a matter of striking a balance... In this case the content changes very infrequently, and having a publish step to static storage makes sense. It really depends on one's needs. If you have a million pages you'd need to regenerate daily for a single site, and thousands every hour, then you might think differently.
rajeevk 11y ago
They also use CDN. As the pages are cacheable, the CDN will decrease the load on their server significantly.

vog 11y ago

In the same vein, I'm surprised how many static websites go down just because they appear on a news site.

munificent 11y ago
Most of those I see either: 1. Aren't static sites but are things like WordPress blogs running server-side PHP essentially unnecessarily. 2. Don't take down the server, but just hit the tiny bandwidth quota of some cheap shared hosting provider, so the host blocks it.
- josephmx 11y ago
  A significant amount also seem to saturate their line, especially on photo-heavy static sites
- mortehu 11y ago
  3. Use the distro's default Apache connection limit of 20, despite the server being able to handle thousands of concurrent connections. The limited connections are then quickly used by users with slow connections.

joshmoz 11y ago

It's cool that they were able to do this with two machines, and I don't want to detract from that, but it's probably worth pointing out that a "machine" is not a very useful unit of capacity. These two machines could be dual core i5s or they could be 20 core xeon boxes with hugely varying amounts of memory and storage. Too bad they don't clarify, I'm curious.

ceequof 11y ago
The fileserver tier consists of pairs of Dell R720s running in active/standby configuration. Each pair is largely similar to the single pair of machines that the old Pages infrastructure ran on. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-r720/pd http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-r720/pd Two Xeon E5-2600s per machine.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ChiperSoft 11y ago
  The ES-2600 series comes in 4 to 12 cores, so that's still a pretty wide range of compute power.

vinhboy 11y ago

I am going to remember this article and bring it up every time some ops crazy people try to trick me into over-engineering shit.

clinta 11y ago
As an ops guy, I'm going to remember this article and use it as a talking point for the benefits of static pages when devs want to put everything into their dynamic framework of choice.
- tracker1 11y ago
  It's a bit of a trade off... static generation of dynamic content isn't so much different from front-side caching, if the bulk of your requests can cache for 30+ minutes, you can setup some pretty decent caching rules on a couple of servers fronting a dynamic backend that doesn't need to be too big to support many requests. For the most part, the load tends to come down to less than optimized database storage and queries on the backend, often duplicated for every page load for content that could easily be offloaded to the client browser, constructed client-side, and requested on demand. It's a matter of striking a balance... In this case the content changes very infrequently, and having a publish step to static storage makes sense. It really depends on one's needs. If you have a million pages you'd need to regenerate daily for a single site, and thousands every hour, then you might think differently.

rajeevk 11y ago

They also use CDN. As the pages are cacheable, the CDN will decrease the load on their server significantly.