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We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

blog.polyhaven.com

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Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#191

Post by xfer »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #58
est31 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 GB of RAM means a lot of ability to cache data in RAM, which the OS does already by default. It of course depends on the type of content you have but generally traffic follows a power law, so most content can be served from RAM directly. The write side I'm a bit more worried about, as e.g. SQLite issues a sync request on each transaction (not sure about the other SQL implementations, should be similar there tho),…

The article explains that they have database and API usage. You can't run a high-throughput database on spinning disks unless you disregard data integrity. It's not just a static fileserver, despite some of the comparisons in this thread.

Spinning disks lose data integrity? You will be surprised where the cloud servers store your backups then. They are doing 80TB/month, you don't need 1GB/s nvme for that(assuming everything is uncached).

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#194

Post by manigandham »

willcipriano wrote: post #25

If you are worried about getting your blog post to the top of Reddit or Hacker News (I've never been there myself); you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. It's the Bart Simpson method of highly scalability[0], for static content you can have global datacenter coverage in a couple minutes or so if you u…

Cloudflare's free tier is more than enough for basic CDN serving and DDOS protection. No need for Pro.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#196

Post by semi-extrinsic »

techie128 wrote: post #193

80TB for 5M page views works out to 16.7MiB per page view. I assume you're serving images and other assets on the page otherwise you have room to optimize on the page weight.

Even if you are serving images that's very heavy for a single page. A 4K resolution jpeg sits at around 6-7 MiB.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#197

Post by bawolff »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #180
bawolff wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case. Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of th…

> Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of thing that makes the difference? The common mistake is to pick a server geographically close to yourself, only access it from low-latency connections, and then assume that everyon…

> Consider the Photopea.com website. The author explained in a comment below that he spends $60/month to host the site without a CDN. Several of us loaded the site and it took 2.5 - 5.0 seconds to load

This is a conclusion i am extremely doubtful of.

Ping time new york tokoyo is about 180ms. So lets say as a worse case the ping time to the single server is 180ms (its probably not that bad), and lets say the latency to cloudflare edge server is 20ms.

So using cloudflare on a cache hit (best case), you save something like 160ms per roundtrip.

Which don't get me wrong is a huge savings and worth it (although this scenario is hugely exagerated).

However say you want to load the page in under 1 second instead of 5 seconds. In this scenario you would basically have to have 25 round trips to bring the site from 5 seconds to 1 second just on rtt savings of having a geo located edge server. If your site needs 25 round trips to load, something else is clearly wrong. (And this is an exagerated case, the real world the benefit would probably be much less)

To be clear i'm not saying that geo located edge caches are bad or useless. They are clearly very beneficial thing. Its just not the be all and end all of web performance, and most people in the demographic we are talking about probably have much more important things to optimize (otoh using cloudflare is cheap and doesnt require a lot of skill, so it is a very low hanging fruit)

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#198

Post by bawolff »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #168
bawolff wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datacenter somewhere isn't going to give the same results, especially if your users are geographically distributed like in this case. Maybe not, but is the target audience that shills out $20/month really the type of people who have optimized their site to such an extent that shaving 50ms off the request latency by having your edge cache geolocated is really the type of th…

Anything over 100ms [1] is perceived as not-instant by a user. If you wait 2RTTs with 50ms per round trip, then you've already exceeded this threshold. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-short...

To clarify, i don't disagree.

I just think if your site takes 700ms, is there really a difference between that and 650ms?

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#199

Post by bryanrasmussen »

kortilla wrote: post #126
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. $20/month for Cloudflare Pro is a steal for what you get. Spinning up a dedicated server in a single datace…

> I get the impression that a lot of the critics in this thread don't really understand Cloudflare, how cheap it is, or even the concept of CDNs in general. You’re talking past the point here. It doesn’t matter how cheap if you’re fundamentally opposed to enabling cloud flare to reach its meat hooks further into the Internet. This is no different from arguments about embedding google analytics or “just paying for win…

I figure helping Cloudflare get it's meathooks in the internet offsets all the really big companies that have their meathooks in, or at any rate doesn't worsen the real problem.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#200

Post by cblconfederate »

how is 5M page views a month a lot? I just looked and my tiny old hetzner server serves at least 30M per month. Presumably hetzner gives 1Gbit for free so that should be enough for 80T (0.2Gbit/month, though i dont have that much traffic). It cost $60
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