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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

#131

Post by vymague »

polote wrote: post #41

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…

> What's the point of this post? OP is serving a file at 50req/sec.

I'd guess a response to the mangadex thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440742

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

#132

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

danudey wrote: post #90
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…

A lot of that is due to absolutely lousy code. We had a system management backend at my last company. Loading the users list was unbearably slow; 10+ seconds on a warm cache. Not too terrible, except that most user management tasks required a page reload, so it was just wildly infuriating. Eventually I took a look at the code for the page, which queried LDAP for user data and the database for permissions data. It did…

I believe the parent's point was that code tends to be faster than what people expect, not slower.

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

#133

Post by tra3 »

danudey wrote: post #90
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…

A lot of that is due to absolutely lousy code. We had a system management backend at my last company. Loading the users list was unbearably slow; 10+ seconds on a warm cache. Not too terrible, except that most user management tasks required a page reload, so it was just wildly infuriating. Eventually I took a look at the code for the page, which queried LDAP for user data and the database for permissions data. It did…

This is an example of N+1 problem [0]. It should be a FizzBuzz for anyone doing any CRUD apps.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/97197/what-is-the-n1-sel...

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

#134

Post by rewq4321 »

paraph1n wrote: post #117
joering2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And msgpack if you want an order of magnitude faster serialization/deserialisation and can put up with worse compression (I think mainly due to schema overhead since protobuf files don't store the schema?)

https://msgpack.org/index.html

Good protobuf vs msgpack comparison: https://medium.com/@hugovs/the-need-for-speed-experimenting-...

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

#136

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

Gepsens wrote: post #49
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.

Probably, Erlang would be a good fit for your task.

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

#137

Post by hu3 »

Rd6n6 wrote: post #54

Re: benchmarking, sometimes the bottleneck is the machine or server that issues the requests, not the receiver that you are testing. To figure out your actual capacity, you sometimes need multiple request servers or a more powerful request server. This was the case for a project I did a few years ago. Not a critique of the blog post, just remembering something out loud His site, https://peepopoll.com/ , took about 10…

Indeed. Recently a client needed to bench raw req/s processing power of their application server and I had to ask for a powerful server running on the same DC in order to discard any potential routing issues.

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

#138

Post by xfitm3 »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #78
fhood wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. Now that CPUs are insanely powerful and you have NVMe SSDs etc the bottleneck is always memory.

In my experience disk i/o is the biggest bottleneck. It used to be sync()ing writes to disk for strict consistency but that's been pushed down to the DB now. I just looked at my DB systems and CPU is low but disk is nearly pegged.

My data sets are far too big to fit into memory/cache. Disk pressure can be alleviated by optimizing queries but it's a game of whack-a-mole.

I have exhausted EBS i/o and been forced to resort to dirty tricks. With RDS you can just pay more but that only scales to a point – normally the budget.

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

#139

Post by namenotrequired »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #132
danudey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that is due to absolutely lousy code. We had a system management backend at my last company. Loading the users list was unbearably slow; 10+ seconds on a warm cache. Not too terrible, except that most user management tasks required a page reload, so it was just wildly infuriating. Eventually I took a look at the code for the page, which queried LDAP for user data and the database for permissions data. It did…

I believe the parent's point was that code tends to be faster than what people expect, not slower.

I think the child's point is that people expect code to be slower than it is because they have seen code be slow far more than necessary.

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

#140

Post by NetToolKit »

nostrademons wrote: post #108
foobarbazetc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Now that CPUs are insanely powerful and you have NVMe SSDs etc the bottleneck is always memory.

It's also amazing how much you can fit in RAM if you're careful. I remember ~2007 people were aghast at Facebook's 4T memcached deployment that stored basically everyone's social network posts; now you can get single servers for ~$4K with 4T of RAM. The trick is basically that you have to eschew the last 15 years of "productivity" enhancements. Pretty much any dynamic language is out; if you must use the JVM or .NET,…

> now you can get single servers for ~$4K with 4T of RAM

Does the $4K include the cost of the RAM? Where can I find these servers? Thanks!

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