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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

#111

Post by crazy_horse »

Zababa wrote: post #107
dreyfan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ~10k rps (it was concurrent connections but close enough) was state of the art in 1999. Now 22 years later ~50 rps is somehow impressive. I honestly don't understand how that can be true. I'm not suggesting you're lying of course, but when you put it this way it's almost like people are actively trying to slow their programs down. I have a few ideas on why that might be the case (switch to slow interpreted language…

This is just basic use the right tools for the right job 101. You've got what is basically a static website. You want to serve static files. To do that, you use a fast language and/or servers written in those languages.

It's something anyone who has done this for any length of time knows, that HN is impressed by this is confusing to some of us. If you were trying to get as little out of your server as possible you'd serve cached content using this framework in this language.

Is this stuff not being learned?

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

#113

Post by joering2 »

blacklion wrote: post #101
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…

Crypto markets are very small :-) I'm working and company which process "real" exchanges, like NASDAQ, LSE, and, especially, OPRA feed. We've added 20+ crypto exchanges in our portfolio this year, and all of them are processed on one old server which is unable to process NASDAQ Total View in real-time anymore. On the other hand, whole OPRA feed (more than 5Gbit/s or 65B/day, yes, it is billions, messages of very opti…

Could you share some more about that very optimized binary protocol? I know there are ways to be more efficient than JSON but since you call it crappy, your solution must be much much better. Honestly interested to readup more.

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

blacklion wrote: post #101
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…

Crypto markets are very small :-) I'm working and company which process "real" exchanges, like NASDAQ, LSE, and, especially, OPRA feed. We've added 20+ crypto exchanges in our portfolio this year, and all of them are processed on one old server which is unable to process NASDAQ Total View in real-time anymore. On the other hand, whole OPRA feed (more than 5Gbit/s or 65B/day, yes, it is billions, messages of very opti…

[deleted]

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

#116

Post by Zababa »

crazy_horse wrote: post #111
Zababa wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ~10k rps (it was concurrent connections but close enough) was state of the art in 1999. Now 22 years later ~50 rps is somehow impressive. I honestly don't understand how that can be true. I'm not suggesting you're lying of course, but when you put it this way it's almost like people are actively trying to slow their programs down. I have a few ideas on why that might be the case (switch to slow interpreted language…

This is just basic use the right tools for the right job 101. You've got what is basically a static website. You want to serve static files. To do that, you use a fast language and/or servers written in those languages. It's something anyone who has done this for any length of time knows, that HN is impressed by this is confusing to some of us. If you were trying to get as little out of your server as possible you'd…

I thought you meant from 10k to 50 rps doing the same work, not that most of the work could be avoided in the first place.

> Is this stuff not being learned?

I don't know if it is. I recently finished my studies, and most people had no curiosity at all. As in, they learned a framework early, used it everywhere, and got a job using it. I do remember reading a few times on tutorial that you should put a Nginx as reverse proxy in front of your Django/Flask/Express server to server static files, so I think most people know/do that but I'm not sure.

On the other hand, having the wisdom of knowing what can be static in the first place? I don't think that it's something teached. In fact this kind of wisdom can be hard to find outside of reading lots of sources frequently in hope of finding little nuggets like that. I don't think I was ever taught explicitely "You should first try to find out if the work you're trying to do is necessary in the first place". In a way it's encoded in YAGNI, but YAGNI isn't universal, and is usually understood at the code level and not the tooling level.

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

#117

Post by paraph1n »

joering2 wrote: post #113
blacklion wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto markets are very small :-) I'm working and company which process "real" exchanges, like NASDAQ, LSE, and, especially, OPRA feed. We've added 20+ crypto exchanges in our portfolio this year, and all of them are processed on one old server which is unable to process NASDAQ Total View in real-time anymore. On the other hand, whole OPRA feed (more than 5Gbit/s or 65B/day, yes, it is billions, messages of very opti…

Could you share some more about that very optimized binary protocol? I know there are ways to be more efficient than JSON but since you call it crappy, your solution must be much much better. Honestly interested to readup more.

There are many binary encoding protocols. A popular one is protobufs[1], which is used by gRPC.

[1]: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers

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

#118

Post by OneEyedRobot »

fhood wrote: post #67
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…

People may underestimate how fast modern machines are, but that is probably in part because, at least in my fairly relevant experience, I have literally never seen a CPU bottleneck under normal circumstances. Memory pressure is nearly always the driving issue.

I've seen exactly the opposite although you certainly can't ignore memory speed.

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

#119

Post by wffurr »

joering2 wrote: post #113
blacklion wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto markets are very small :-) I'm working and company which process "real" exchanges, like NASDAQ, LSE, and, especially, OPRA feed. We've added 20+ crypto exchanges in our portfolio this year, and all of them are processed on one old server which is unable to process NASDAQ Total View in real-time anymore. On the other hand, whole OPRA feed (more than 5Gbit/s or 65B/day, yes, it is billions, messages of very opti…

Could you share some more about that very optimized binary protocol? I know there are ways to be more efficient than JSON but since you call it crappy, your solution must be much much better. Honestly interested to readup more.

https://www.opraplan.com/datafeeds

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

#120

Post by louwrentius »

I'm hosting my static blog site on a physical Raspberry Pi 3B+ powered by Solar [1].

That blog post got hugged by HN but it didn't even raise the CPU above 10% on a single core.

And a Raspberry Pi 3B+ is dog slow. And severely limited by bandwidth, unlike the Raspberry Pi 4B+. (But it uses less power so that's why I use a 3B+).

However I have another point to make. Professional rack-mount servers from HP and Dell can be had second hand for dirt cheap and you get a ton of CPU (20+ cores) and an ocean of RAM for next to nothing.

For many applications, an old Gen8 or similar Dell server will perform more than adequately. Even more so if you have a little bit more to spend on Gen9.

They are so cheap that you can like buy four to eight, sprinkle them across two different datacenters and even if one breaks, you won't be in any hurry.

[1]: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po...

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