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Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?

#31

Post by goldenkey »

technion wrote: post #25
pbreit wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious what AWS/DigitalOcean setup would be able to run HN. Any educated guesses?

Playing around with the calculator, you're roughly on track with an r3.x4large - most of the Linux options happily bundle far less RAM. Getting 9TB of EBS on top of that puts the bill at $1516 per month. None of that accounts for traffic, of which we know nothing about. The thing is in an Amazon world, you could optimise the setup for an Amazon deployment. For example, you'd probably move parts of that data, like dat…

It just goes to show that cloud prices are somewhat of a ripoff if you have the knowhow to use CDNs and setup a single server in a colocation center. That machine can be built for less than 5k.

Re: Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?

#32

Post by r2dnb »

dang wrote: post #30
jtchang wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an absolutely beast of a motherboard. 1.5TB of ram!

If only we could use it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014632

As an aside, how do you do to find such old posts ? Is there a search function I haven't heard of ?

Re: Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?

#33

Post by CarolineW »

r2dnb wrote: post #32
dang wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we could use it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014632

As an aside, how do you do to find such old posts ? Is there a search function I haven't heard of ?

I'm assuming you know of the search box at the bottom of every HN page - what more do you think is being used? Why do you think something more is needed?

As an aside, I went to look at some of your old posts and got this:

    Secure Connection Failed

    The connection to the server was reset
    while the page was loading.

        The page you are trying to view cannot
        be shown because the authenticity of
        the received data could not be verified.
        Please contact the web site owners to
        inform them of this problem.

Re: Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?

#35

Post by kogir »

technion wrote: post #25
pbreit wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious what AWS/DigitalOcean setup would be able to run HN. Any educated guesses?

Playing around with the calculator, you're roughly on track with an r3.x4large - most of the Linux options happily bundle far less RAM. Getting 9TB of EBS on top of that puts the bill at $1516 per month. None of that accounts for traffic, of which we know nothing about. The thing is in an Amazon world, you could optimise the setup for an Amazon deployment. For example, you'd probably move parts of that data, like dat…

With EBS you can't just match size, since the IOPS and latency matter far more.

Re: Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?

#36

Post by kogir »

mschuster91 wrote: post #23
kogir wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of it is redundancy. Either duplicate copies, parity, or previous snapshots (off of which the backups are based). I think the whole HN dataset is well under 100GiB, and maybe even under 30GiB.

So in theory you don't need any spinning rust, it should all fit into RAM ;)

I like my storage to persist across power failures :)

Re: Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?

#37

Post by r2dnb »

CarolineW wrote: post #33
r2dnb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, how do you do to find such old posts ? Is there a search function I haven't heard of ?

I'm assuming you know of the search box at the bottom of every HN page - what more do you think is being used? Why do you think something more is needed? As an aside, I went to look at some of your old posts and got this: Secure Connection Failed The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be…

Thanks a lot, no I never noticed the search bar.

Thanks the website has been taken down.

Re: Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?

#38

Post by dang »

r2dnb wrote: post #32
dang wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we could use it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014632

As an aside, how do you do to find such old posts ? Is there a search function I haven't heard of ?

To add to what CarolineW posted, I remembered that the comment existed so I went to HN search and entered "by:kogir gc". (I then had to manually switch the results from stories to comments, though.)

Re: Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?

#39

Post by mbrock »

lukeHeuer wrote: post #34
mbrock wrote: post #14

I'm curious about the total byte size of all HN content.

The mirror I keep of all HN items (posts, comments, jobs, polls, etc.) in JSON format is at 5.32GB uncompressed.

Cool! Did you mirror everything from the API? Does it go back to the first test posts or whatever? :)

Re: Ask HN: What is the hardware of Hacker News?

#40

Post by gregmac »

goldenkey wrote: post #31
technion wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing around with the calculator, you're roughly on track with an r3.x4large - most of the Linux options happily bundle far less RAM. Getting 9TB of EBS on top of that puts the bill at $1516 per month. None of that accounts for traffic, of which we know nothing about. The thing is in an Amazon world, you could optimise the setup for an Amazon deployment. For example, you'd probably move parts of that data, like dat…

It just goes to show that cloud prices are somewhat of a ripoff if you have the knowhow to use CDNs and setup a single server in a colocation center. That machine can be built for less than 5k.

Of course -- if you know your traffic well ahead of time. If you start growing quickly, it's not quite as simple. (And if you don't have the traffic/growth anticipated, you wasted a bunch of money).

You also aren't accounting for redundancy. If the machine totally blows up, how quickly can you build another? Or do you spend +5k to have a second sitting as a standby? If the hardware does fail (whether it's a single drive in RAID or the whole system), who fixes it (or deals with getting it fixed)? For that matter, is the person who built or sourced the hardware's time worth $0?

Cloud IS more expensive, but it's not as simple as comparing to the up-front cost of one piece of hardware.

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