Ask HN: HN web stack? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#11

Post by j_baker » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 4:30 AM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #5

No database. Just flat files cached in memory on demand, IIRC. I think about that when people worry about scalability. HN seems to do okay.

HN has scaled, but not because pg hasn't worried about scaling (although to be fair, it doesn't seem to have worried much):

"I already have problems enough with that. Remember, the original motivation for HN was to test a new programming language, and moreover one that's focused on experimenting with language design, not performance. Every time the site gets slow, I fortify myself by recalling McIlroy and Bentley's famous quote

The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.

and look for the bottleneck I can remove with least code. So far I've been able to keep up, in the sense that performance has remained consistently mediocre despite 14x growth. I don't know what I'll do next, but I'll probably think of something."

http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#12

Post by jackolas » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 5:02 AM UTC

Darmani wrote: post #2

http://www.arclanguage.com/install You can read the source code yourself. I don't remember the database, but it's running on an Arc server.

Being proxied to Server:Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) fyi

edit: I don't think the page itself is actually proxied it seems only the static content is.

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#13

Post by dholowiski » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 5:37 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #7

omnix wrote: post #4

or OP could be trying to hack hackernews

And what a crisis that would be. All of our publicly-available comments would become available publicly!

How about all of our hashed passwords- that would be a treasure trove

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#14

Post by known » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 5:50 AM UTC

epochwolf wrote: post #3

I thought the database was flat files.

Yes, everything is a file in UNIX

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#15

Post by cypherpunks01 » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 6:10 AM UTC

dholowiski wrote: post #13

jrockway wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what a crisis that would be. All of our publicly-available comments would become available publicly!

How about all of our hashed passwords- that would be a treasure trove

http://openid.net/

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#16

Post by ryan-allen » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 9:27 AM UTC

jackolas wrote: post #12

Darmani wrote: post #2

http://www.arclanguage.com/install You can read the source code yourself. I don't remember the database, but it's running on an Arc server.

Being proxied to Server:Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) fyi edit: I don't think the page itself is actually proxied it seems only the static content is.

If the app is behind apache and writing static files for serving things up, and only hitting arc on operations like votes and cache misses then of course it's gonna scale! Especially if the app is read heavy :)

Is the HN source code actually open source itself?

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#17

Post by cloudhead » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 9:41 AM UTC

kaiser_pelagic wrote: post #8

silentbicycle wrote: post #5

No database. Just flat files cached in memory on demand, IIRC. I think about that when people worry about scalability. HN seems to do okay.

using flat files just seems crazy to me, but HN seems to be doing it well.

Why? A database is just an optimized flat file with a query engine.

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#18

Post by rlmw » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 12:03 PM UTC

cloudhead wrote: post #17

kaiser_pelagic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

using flat files just seems crazy to me, but HN seems to be doing it well.

Why? A database is just an optimized flat file with a query engine.

Because a database is an optimized flat file with a query engine. Its commonly the case that you wish to optimize your flat files' performance and query them. I believe that pg has mentioned a few times that he's 'notorious' for using flat files for this kind of thing. I'd love to see the code for Viaweb and the design decisions in there.

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#19

Post by RossM » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 1:32 PM UTC

dholowiski wrote: post #13

jrockway wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what a crisis that would be. All of our publicly-available comments would become available publicly!

How about all of our hashed passwords- that would be a treasure trove

I don't see why you're being downvoted, your comment is obviously sarcastic.

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#20

Post by silentbicycle » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 1:39 PM UTC

j_baker wrote: post #11

silentbicycle wrote: post #5

No database. Just flat files cached in memory on demand, IIRC. I think about that when people worry about scalability. HN seems to do okay.

HN has scaled, but not because pg hasn't worried about scaling (although to be fair, it doesn't seem to have worried much ): "I already have problems enough with that. Remember, the original motivation for HN was to test a new programming language, and moreover one that's focused on experimenting with language design, not performance. Every time the site gets slow, I fortify myself by recalling McIlroy and Bentley's…

Sure. Profiling and incremental tuning has been sufficient so far. It will probably be hard to scale indefinitely, but HN already handles quite a bit more traffic than many sites.