Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mark.mcnally.je

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 479 posts

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

#41

Post by polote »

What's the point of this post? OP is serving a file at 50req/sec. There is not even mention of a dB query. How is that able to relate to any kind of normal app?

I guess that the post was written as an answer to the mangadex post [1]. Mangadex was handling 3k req/sec involving dB queries. It was not just a cached Html page.

50req/sec for a Html file is super low which shows that a $4 month server cant do much actually. So yes this is enough for a blog, but a lot of websites are not blogs

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440742

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

#42

Post by Tenoke »

fbrchps wrote: post #35
blfr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In their defence the sites that fail to load or take too long are usually full webapps that do a lot of work rather than just static sites.

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

#43

Post by mark_mcnally_je »

antihero wrote: post #37
fbrchps wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah a varnish install locally is the next step up from what I am doing I guess. Spinning up multiple POPs + cloudflare is way to much IMO

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

#44

Post by mark_mcnally_je »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #40
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.

Thanks! Just goes to show that it runs quickly even when it hits #1 on HN ;)

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

#45

Post by spicybright »

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…

Working extremely fast for me right now. Your post was about 20 minutes ago. I don't know how HN traffic fluctuates, but it seems really solid compared to most sites.

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

#46

Post by fizwhiz »

nostrademons wrote: post #20

People 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 we…

Would you mind describing your stack in more detail? Did you use gRPC with Go?

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

#47

Post by watermelon0 »

dreyfan wrote: post #23
ppeetteerr wrote: post #4

How did this make it to the number two spot on HackerNews?

Broadly speaking people on HN have no clue how to setup a performant httpd/app server and are impressed by abysmal performance/cost metrics like this or the MangaDex post. Everything these days is obscured through multiple layers of SaaS offerings and unnecessary bloat like kubernetes. ~10k rps (it was concurrent connections but close enough) was state of the art in 1999. Now 22 years later ~50 rps is somehow impress…

I would guess this is close to a default Apache + mod_wsgi setup, and this is one of the easiest way of hosting Python web apps, so basically achievable by anyone on HN.

I assume (based on 180 req/s for static page) that he is using mpm_prefork, where each Apache child handles a single connection. If he switched to mpm_event, which uses event loop like nginx, ~10k rps should easily be achievable, but I don't think WSGI would work with that.

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

#48

Post by umvi »

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…

Loaded instantly for me

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

#49

Post by Gepsens »

nostrademons wrote: post #20

People 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 we…

I'm running a crypto trading platform I'm developing on 30$ on DigitalOcean. I coded exclusively in Rust and recently added a dynamic interface to python. Today during the BTC crash it spiked at 20k events/s, and that's only incoming data.

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

#50

Post by ezfe »

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.

Oh I hate Google as much as the next guy, but that's not something they've shown any interest in doing.
Post reply on HN