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My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

mark.mcnally.je

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Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#31

Post by blfr »

fbrchps wrote: post #12

I 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…

your site is taking multiple seconds to load for me, depending on when I refresh.

Barely over a second here. Much better than vast majority of "webscale" services.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#33

Post by tomrod »

fbrchps wrote: post #25
mark_mcnally_je wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if I was building a business website I would want distributed caching/a CDN, mainly to support spikes, like what is happening now!

Working in the space, that's one of the more frustrating things to see on HN/Reddit/etc. It's not a complex or niche thing, and especially for sites that only make profit when people can actually visit them, it's kind of a necessity to stay up as much as possible. (Obviously the sales thing doesn't apply to OP)

For those of us that are new to the space, lack background, or wear 50 hats in a startup, can you point us to best practices here?

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#34

Post by fbrchps »

floren wrote: post #18
fbrchps wrote: post #12

I 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.

It would also be possible for OP to spin up their own Redis cache, and have multiple POPs near their target audience, and handle DoS type attacks against their site if need be, and easily be able to brush aside bot traffic, and...

Not all the above apply to a hobby-blog style site, but I wasn't referring only to OP's site in my original comment. I understand that not everyone needs to feed into "fucking Internet gatekeeper"s as you described, but the fact that they provide valuable services is undeniable. They make a complex operation -- one that could mean the difference between a company being able to sell their product or not -- simple.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#35

Post by fbrchps »

blfr wrote: post #31
fbrchps wrote: post #12

I 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…

your site is taking multiple seconds to load for me, depending on when I refresh. Barely over a second here. Much better than vast majority of "webscale" services.

For sure, OP's site is handling this much better than most. And like I said, it's not every time that it takes multiple seconds. Some websites featured on HN/Reddit don't load at all when under load. However I was able to get it to take ~30s to load multiple times, over a period of around 10 minutes.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#37

Post by antihero »

fbrchps wrote: post #34
floren wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would also be possible for OP to spin up their own Redis cache, and have multiple POPs near their target audience, and handle DoS type attacks against their site if need be, and easily be able to brush aside bot traffic, and... Not all the above apply to a hobby-blog style site, but I wasn't referring only to OP's site in my original comment. I understand that not everyone needs to feed into "fucking Internet gate…

Could just install Varnish locally.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#38

Post by markandrewj »

Normally benchmarks for things like this are measured in how many concurrent requests can be handled, i.e the C10K problem, not by how many requests you are able to serve in a day. It's also well known that you can serve a large amount of requests on limited hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem

"By the early 2010s millions of connections on a single commodity 1U rackmount server became possible: over 2 million connections (WhatsApp, 24 cores, using Erlang on FreeBSD),[6][7] 10–12 million connections (MigratoryData, 12 cores, using Java on Linux).[5][8]"

Although I do understand the boxes listed above have more resources then the VPS you are using. I am also not criticizing your write up, or results, bench-marking is in general interesting to do. I just wanted to provide some additional information.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#39

Post by jeroenhd »

fbrchps wrote: post #12

I 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…

Are you sure that's related to the server itself? The page loads instantly for me and the DNS is still resolving to an OVH IP address.

Timing info from Firefox: Blocked: 0ms DNS resolution: 8ms Connecting: 9ms TLS setup: 12ms Sending: 0ms Waiting: 30ms

The very last resource (favicon.ico) loaded after 466ms and that's mostly because of the other files being requested only after the CSS has come in (after about 195ms). All in all the entire site (without the Matomo tracking JS) loaded in half a second.

Maybe the website has switched hosts in the last ten minutes, I guess, but I doubt it. I think this is more likely to be a problem related to distance to origin and saturation of the underlying connection.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#40

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

fbrchps wrote: post #12

I 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…

Weird, this site loads really fast for me actually. Much faster than most sites that I visit.
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