I'm not sure there was ever an argument saying otherwise. The ease of processing X million requests is heavily dependant on what those requests actually do. Trivial use cases shouldn't be a surprise to have high throughput.
My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
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Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
#12I understand your excitement for being able to handle a decent amount of requests on such a small server, but just like many other websites that get on the frontpage of HN, your site is taking multiple seconds to load for me, depending on when I refresh.
As you said in your post, adding caching to your site increased your throughput by ~20% (or +10/req/sec). What you and other sites seem to lack is a more distributed caching, a la CloudFlare, S3 CloudFront, Azure CDN, etc. Those last two only really work well for a static site, however as mentioned in your post that's essentially what you're serving.
While I'm all for having a free-as-in-freedom hosting solution and keeping things lean, the internet is a fickle beast, and nothing looks worse for a company who posts on HN when their technology-oriented site can't handle a few thousand requests per minute. (Or in this case, when a blog claims to handle 4.2M requests a day -- 2.9k req/min)
Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
#13How did this make it to the number two spot on HackerNews?
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Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
#14#1 on HN and still up. That speaks for itself.
:)
Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
#15Well the front page of HN won't get you 4.2M views today, but it's a pretty good real world test!
True, but it may very well get you a lot more than 50 a minute.
Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
#16How did this make it to the number two spot on HackerNews?
IMHO, it's better than a deluge of political posts.
I don't mind reading about politics but I come to HN to read about tech. We can go elsewhere to get whatever politics we desire.
Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
#17I understand your excitement for being able to handle a decent amount of requests on such a small server, but just like many other websites that get on the frontpage of HN, your site is taking multiple seconds to load for me, depending on when I refresh. As you said in your post, adding caching to your site increased your throughput by ~20% (or +10/req/sec). What you and other sites seem to lack is a more distributed…
200 rps is not great.
Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
#18I understand your excitement for being able to handle a decent amount of requests on such a small server, but just like many other websites that get on the frontpage of HN, your site is taking multiple seconds to load for me, depending on when I refresh. As you said in your post, adding caching to your site increased your throughput by ~20% (or +10/req/sec). What you and other sites seem to lack is a more distributed…
Looks fine over here, and he doesn't have to route through a fucking Internet gatekeeper like Cloudflare or Amazon... let's enjoy this golden era before Chrome starts flagging any site which isn't fronted by a "reputable" cache like Cloudflare, Amazon, or whatever Google decides to introduce.
Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
#19I understand your excitement for being able to handle a decent amount of requests on such a small server, but just like many other websites that get on the frontpage of HN, your site is taking multiple seconds to load for me, depending on when I refresh. As you said in your post, adding caching to your site increased your throughput by ~20% (or +10/req/sec). What you and other sites seem to lack is a more distributed…
Yeah if I was building a business website I would want distributed caching/a CDN, mainly to support spikes, like what is happening now!
Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
#20People tend to severely underestimate how fast modern machines are and overestimate how much you need to spend on hardware.
Back in my last startup, I was doing a crypto market intelligence website that subscribed to full trade & order book feeds from the top 10 exchanges. It handled about 3K incoming messages/second (~260M per day), including all of the message parsing, order book update, processing, streaming to websocket connections on any connected client, and archival to PostGres for historical processing. Total hardware required was 1 m4.large + 1 r5.large AWS instances, for a bit under $200/month, and the boxes would regularly run at about 50% CPU.