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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

#261

Post by willvarfar »

mynameisash wrote: post #158
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…

What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.[0] I'm more than a little annoyed that so much data engineering is still done in Scala Spark or PySpark. Both suffer from pretty high memory overhead, which leads to suboptimal resource utilization. I've worked with a few different systems that compile their queries into C/C++ (which is transparent to the developer). Those tend to be significantly faster or can use fewer nodes to p…

Yes, the whole idea of sending “agents” to do processing is poor performing and things like snowflake and Trino, where queries go to already deployed code, run rings around it.

Furthermore, pyspark is by far the most popular and used spark, and it’s also got the absolute world-worst atrocious mechanical sympathy. Why?

Developer velocity trumps compute velocity any day?

(I want the niceness of python and the performance of eg firebolt. Why must I pick?)

(There is a general thing to get spark “off heap” and use generic query compute on the spark sql space, but it is miles behind those who start off there)

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

#262

Post by voltagex_ »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #227
Waterluvian wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What reminded me of this the other day is how MacOS will grow your cursor if you “shake” it to help you find it on a big screen. I was thinking about how they must have a routine that’s constantly taking mouse input, buffering history, and running some algorithm to determine when user input is a mouse “shake”. And how many features like this add up to eat up a nontrivial amount of resources.

Simply moving my USB mouse consumes 10% of my CPU. Computers these days...

Your report rate may be too high.

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

#265

Post by noduerme »

PhilipTai wrote: post #246
Spooky23 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a kick out of stuff like this - I’m mostly an exec these days, but I recently prototyped a small database system to feed a business process in SQLite on my laptop. To my amusement, my little SQLite prototype smoked the “enterprise” database. Turns out that a MacBook Pro SSD performs better than the SAN, and the query planner needs more tlc. We ended up running the queries off my laptop for a few days while the…

Right. Local storage is much more performant and cost effective than network storage. I tried to run some iops sensitive workload on cloud. It turns out I need to pay several thousands dollar per month for the performance I can get on a $100 nvme ssd.

I'm working on a web app right now that does a lot of heavy/live/realtime processing with workers. The original thought was to run those workers on the node servers and stream the results over a socket, charging by the CPU/minute. But it surprised me that the performance looks a lot better up to about 16 workers if the user just turns over a few cores to local web workers and runs it on their own box. As long as they don't need 64 cores or something, it's faster to run locally, even on an older machine. Thread transport is slow but sockets are slower at a distance; the bottlenecks are in the main thread anyway. So I've been making sure parts are interchangeable between web workers and "remote socket web workers" assigned to each instance of the app remotely.

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

#266

Post by lewisjoe »

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 two different projects on a single instance of cheap VM too. Both of them runs on a not-so-memory-efficient programming runtime, yet the VM handles the load just fine.

Of course, a lot of it depends on what your app does for each request but most apps are simple enough and can live with being a monolith / single fat binary running on a single instance.

The problem with today's DevOps culture is that they present K8's as answers for everything. Instead of defining a clear line on when to use them and when not to.

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

#267

Post by WanderPanda »

nostrademons wrote: post #196
Waterluvian wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What reminded me of this the other day is how MacOS will grow your cursor if you “shake” it to help you find it on a big screen. I was thinking about how they must have a routine that’s constantly taking mouse input, buffering history, and running some algorithm to determine when user input is a mouse “shake”. And how many features like this add up to eat up a nontrivial amount of resources.

That particular example seems like something that's probably a lot cheaper than you'd initially think. The OS has to constantly take mouse input anyway to move the pointer and dispatch events to userspace. It also needs to record the current and new position of the mouse pointer to dispatch the events. Detecting whether the mouse is being "shaken" can be done with a ring buffer of mouse velocities over the last secon…

Why not use an exponential filter that only uses a single variable?

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

#268

Post by noduerme »

When I launched my former bitcoin casino in 2011 (it's gone, but it was a casino where all games, even roulette tables were multiplayer, on a platform built from scratch starting in '08), I handled all web requests through a server in Costa Rica that cost about $6/mo. Where I had a shell corporation for $250/year. Once the front end -- the bullet containing the entire casino code, about 250kb -- loaded, from Costa Rica, and once a user logged in, they were socketed to a server that handled the gaming action in the Isle of Man. Graphics and sounds were still sent from the Costa Rica server. I didn't have a gaming license in the IoM, though - that was around $400k to acquire legally. So I found a former IoM MP who was a lawyer, who wrote a letter to the IoM gov't stating that we didn't perform random calculations on their server, thus weren't a gambling site under IoM law. Technically that meant that no dice roll or card shuffle leading to a gambling win or loss took place on that server. So the IoM server handled the socketed user interactions, chat, hand rotation and tournament stuff. Also the bitcoin daemon and deposits/withdrawals. But to avoid casino licensing, I then set up a VPS in Switzerland that did only one thing: Return random numbers or shuffled decks of cards, with its own RNG. It was a quick backend cUrl call that would return a fresh deck or a dice roll, for any given random interaction on the casino servers. The IoM server would call the Swiss server every time a hand was dealt or a wheel was spun; the user was still looking at a site served from a cheap web host in Costa Rica. And thus... yeah, I guess I handled millions of requests a day over a $6 webserver, if you want to count it that way.

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

#269

Post by [deleted] »

noduerme wrote: post #268

When I launched my former bitcoin casino in 2011 (it's gone, but it was a casino where all games, even roulette tables were multiplayer, on a platform built from scratch starting in '08), I handled all web requests through a server in Costa Rica that cost about $6/mo. Where I had a shell corporation for $250/year. Once the front end -- the bullet containing the entire casino code, about 250kb -- loaded, from Costa Ri…

[deleted]

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

#270

Post by danjac »

benhoyt wrote: post #201
simonw wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Django's prefetch_related mechanism essentially implements the pattern you describe here for you: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/models/querysets/#...

Thanks. Yeah, I think I used that years ago when I first ran into this problem, and it worked well. Whether one uses an ORM or not, one needs to know how to use one's tools. My problem (not just with Django, but with ORMs in general) is how they make bad code look good. Like the following (I don't know Django well anymore, but something like this): users = User.objects.all() for u in user: print(u.name, len(u.comment…

A good habit when writing unit tests is to use assertNumQueries especially with views. It's very easy even for an experienced developer to inadvertently add an extra query per row: for example if you have a query using only() to restrict the columns you return, and in a template you refer to another column not covered by only(), Django will do another query to fetch that column value (not 100% if that's still the case, but that was the behavior last time I looked). The developer might be just fixing what they think is a template issue and won't know they've just stepped on a performance landmine.
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