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Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

khanacademy.org

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Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

#211

Post by samrosea »

dangoor wrote: post #182
malux85 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the technology breakdown costs are? Is there anyone from KA engineering here who can satisfy our curiosity? Most of it would be outgoing bandwidth I’d think... maybe storage as well?

Our videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost. Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage. We're working to move to Go, which will make a big difference in this part of our bill. http://engineering.…

>Go is better supported than Kotlin by a broad range of editors

Lol is this a joke when Kotlin is literally made by IntelliJ?

Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

#212

Post by solotronics »

dangoor wrote: post #187
drewg123 wrote: post #165

I was hoping to find more info on the "250% nominal load" mentioned in the title. However, I didn't see anything about load on the linked page, just a generic looking donation page. I'm a bit biased, because I focus on CPU efficiency for a major CDN, but I'd be super curious what exactly is at 250%? Network bandwidth? CPU? IOPS? Are there big hammers that they can use to get things back under control without adding s…

Video playing is mostly handled by YouTube. Features which use a lot of CPU are tracking learner progress, managing classrooms, and the like. These features are really important right now as teachers have moved classes online. We are in the process of moving this code to Go, which should still be very productive for us but also reduce how much CPU is required.

Python3 has pretty good built in modules for asyncio, multiprocessing, and multithreading. Maybe port to py3 and utilize these features as an intermediate step while you are working on the jump to Go. I like to take a function for a single work unit "do a single thing" and then call it from a function utilizing asyncio and multithreading, this link shows a great examples.

https://pymotw.com/3/asyncio/executors.html

Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

#213

Post by dangoor »

phonon wrote: post #209
dangoor wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost. Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage. We're working to move to Go, which will make a big difference in this part of our bill. http://engineering.…

Did you try switching your interpreter to PyPy?

That's not possible in that particular hosting environment. I believe some people have done experiments with PyPy, but the difference in performance is nothing like that we see with Go.

Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

#214

Post by dangoor »

solotronics wrote: post #212
dangoor wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video playing is mostly handled by YouTube. Features which use a lot of CPU are tracking learner progress, managing classrooms, and the like. These features are really important right now as teachers have moved classes online. We are in the process of moving this code to Go, which should still be very productive for us but also reduce how much CPU is required.

Python3 has pretty good built in modules for asyncio, multiprocessing, and multithreading. Maybe port to py3 and utilize these features as an intermediate step while you are working on the jump to Go. I like to take a function for a single work unit "do a single thing" and then call it from a function utilizing asyncio and multithreading, this link shows a great examples. https://pymotw.com/3/asyncio/executors.html

For reasons I touch on in our blog post[1], porting to Python 3 would still be a huge amount of work (not quite as large as the port to Go, but still very large and without other benefits we get from Go).

[1]: http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm

Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

#216

Post by xnyan »

maps7 wrote: post #174
xnyan wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you know, I donated some money because they did it fist. Humans work like that, it’s how we think. So now they are responsible for $1000 plus a bit more of server time.

Are you implying I'm not human in some twisted way? Either way enough people disagree with me so my comment is dead and likely any more conversation from me will be down voted so I won't continue this. Stay safe.

It was probably not necessary to put words in my mouth. You also stay safe.

Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

#217

Post by vowelless »

joppy wrote: post #160
vowelless wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> takes a pay cut to $200,000 That’s less than new grad money at tech companies. It shows you are not serious about your suggestions

What companies hire new grads for $200k?

Grads get those numbers for FB NY and Google NYC (at least based on what they told our recruiters).

levels.fyi seems to corroborate this too:

https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Facebook/SE/E3/

https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/SE/L3/

Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

#218

Post by phaemon »

wendyshu wrote: post #206
phaemon wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He probably has. He's asking for amounts from $5 to $100 dollars. What makes you think he hasn't donated at least that much? How much did you donate?

You have a point, maybe he's in the job he's best at, he's worth double that to the organization so he's effectively donating $800k/yr, and that's the optimal amount to give to charity given his preferences. If so, no foul. When I was a student I gave on the order of $100 per year. Anyway I feel sorry for you because you attack people instead of ideas, that must be really draining.

The lack of self awareness in that comment is amazing. Do you ever read what you write?

Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

#219

Post by 0_gravitas »

arzel wrote: post #43

Ahh.. Khan Academy.. the usefulness this site provided throughout my middle and high school education. Quite frankly, it literally saved my ass. I've gone ahead and donated $1K.

> the usefulness this site provided throughout my middle and high school education

I'm a deal past these periods in my life, and I did quite well via just arbitrary memorization, at the cost of never really developing an intuitive understanding, and therefore a true appreciation, for subjects like math. I've only recently started going through KA's courses, starting all the way back in Algebra.

Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

#220

Post by dannysu »

I've been a fan of Khan Academy since they were just some Youtube videos.

You can find Khan Academy's past Form 990 online and I've been archiving them.

Sal Khan made:

2008: ? ($0 revenue)

2009: ?

2010: $70,833

2011: $348,879

2012: $348,529

2013: $348,292

2014: $548,116

2015: $800,000

2016: $815,000

2017: $785,000

2018: $824,000

You can see that, just like a startup, the sacrifice in the beginning as a founder is real. Before 2010 his salary from KA was probably 0 or significantly less. $70K in 2010 was less than my new grad salary. The jump in 2011 to $350K is around how much a senior makes in HCOL areas now. There has been basically no adjustment in his earning for 4 years from 2015 to 2018.

From the 990 forms, you can also get a sense of how much other people in the organization are being paid. I think all of them can command higher compensation elsewhere, but choose to work at KA because leveling the playing field for education is such a great mission.

Sal Khan's compensation as a CEO is only ~3.x times of many senior positions in the organization. Not outrageous at all.

In 2008's Form 990, Sal Khan wrote that KA is being used by 10,000 students daily. I don't know how many accounts, but growing from that to 71 million in 2018 is incredible. The impact to the world is undeniable.

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