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HN is up again

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Re: HN is up again

#221

Post by [deleted] »

oblio wrote: post #182
alberth wrote: post #36

I’d love to learn more about HN hardware & software stack. I know old posts indicate it’s running on a low core count but high frequency Intel CPUs on FreeBSD and no database (just flat files). I wonder if it’s still the same.

Ah, that's easy. HN is running on an old laptop from Viaweb. Arc is running under the pg user and it's used as the process supervisor. The actual web server is a VB app running on Linux through Wine. The flat files have been migrated to an MS Access DB, also running through Wine.

[deleted]

Re: HN is up again

#222

Post by GekkePrutser »

toast0 wrote: post #190
clintonwoo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes total sense but I've never heard of it. Is there any literature or writing about this phenomenon? I guess proper redundancy is having different brands of equipment also in some cases.

I also don't know about literature on this phenomenon, but i recall HP had two different SSD recalls because when the uptime counter rolled over, they would fail. That's not even load dependent, just did you get a batch and power them on all at the same time. Uptime is too high causing issues isn't that unusual for storage, unfortunately. It's not always easy, but if you can, you want manufacturer diversity, batch di…

The crucial M4 had this too but it was fixable with a firmware update.

https://www.neoseeker.com/news/18098-64gb-crucial-m4s-crashi...

Re: HN is up again

#224

Post by GekkePrutser »

chippiewill wrote: post #111
sillysaurusx wrote: post #20

HN was down because the failover server also failed: https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/1545409429113229312 Double disk failure is improbable but not impossible. The most impressive thing is that there seems to be no dataloss, almost whatsoever. Whatever the backup system is, it seems rock solid.

> Double disk failure is improbable but not impossible. It's actually surprisingly common for failover hardware to fail shortly after the primary hardware. It's normally been exposed to similar conditions to what killed the primary and the strain of failing over pushes it over the edge.

Isn't that more for load balancing than failover?

For load balancing I would consider this very likely because both are equally loaded. But "failover" I would usually consider a scenario where a second server is purely in wait for the primary to fail, in which case it would be virtually unused. Like an active/passive scenario as someone mentioned below.

But perhaps I got my terminology mixed up. I'm not working with servers so much anymore.

Re: HN is up again

#225

Post by andrepd »

joncp wrote: post #150
christophilus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Same. It says a lot about the quality of HN, I think. Also, I can't remember the last time it was down. For a while, I thought there must be something wrong with my internet connection or DNS config or something.

Indeed. I find that it's so reliable and fast that I use it to check my internet connection. If I can't hit HN, then something's wrong on my end.

I use example.com for that purpose :p

Re: HN is up again

#227

Post by ahepp »

I read an article recently on avoiding fallback in distributed systems.[0]

Is it more appropriate to call the strategy in this case fallback, or failover? Since the secondary server wasn't running in production until the first one failed, it sounds like fallback?

Perhaps higher reliability strategies would have been instead of having a secondary server, just have more mirrored disks on the main server, to reduce the likelihood of the array being compromised?

Alternatively, to run both the primary and secondary servers in production all the time. But that would presumably merely move the single point of failure to the proxy?

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/avoiding-fallback-in...

Re: HN is up again

#228

Post by doublerabbit »

bestinterest wrote: post #168
Amfy wrote: post #128

Interesting though, HN is now hosted on AWS and no longer on bare metal (m5 hosting). % host news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com has address 50.112.136.166 and also interesting: DNS TTL is set to 1 (one).

Oh that is interesting, I guess they just spun up a beefy EC2 instance. I'm noticing slower performance, I used to get about NetRange: 50.112.0.0 - 50.112.255.255 CIDR: 50.112.0.0/16 NetName: AMAZON-EC2-USWESTOR NetHandle: NET-50-112-0-0-1 Parent: NET50 (NET-50-0-0-0-0) NetType: Direct Allocation OriginAS: AS14618 Organization: Amazon.com, Inc. (AMAZO-47)

I hope it's temporary. Would hate HN to move to the "cloud" from bare metal.

Re: HN is up again

#229

Post by ijidak »

christophilus wrote: post #122
joshstrange wrote: post #34

I don't think I had ever fully internalized how often I open this site throughout the day. Finish a task? HN. Got frustrated/stuck on a problem? HN break. Waiting for something to install/upload/compile/etc? HN. Needless to say I opened a new tab, typed "n", and hit enter countless times today before my brain caught up with my muscle memory.

Yep. Same. It says a lot about the quality of HN, I think. Also, I can't remember the last time it was down. For a while, I thought there must be something wrong with my internet connection or DNS config or something.

Haha. A building of ours in Canada lost internet at the same time.

When I saw hn was down, I double-checked the news to see if a major part of the internet had gone down.

Re: HN is up again

#230

Post by GekkePrutser »

grepfru_it wrote: post #174
sillysaurusx wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s already been around since 2007. How many decades does HN need to be around before people realize it’s an institution?

Slashdot has been around since 1997 and people still rave about its moderation system today. However, while I have high hopes for HN, it could very well go the way of digg overnight

I doubt that though. Digg was hyped way too much and the inevitable decline that comes after a hype killed it. Some things are good enough to survive that phase but Digg wasn't. HN never had a hype phase, just slow but strong & steady growth. And not growing too much either.

It seems the perfect circumstances to really last. It doesn't have an invasive business model, or investors screaming for ROI either. That's the kind of thing that often leads to user-hostile changes that so often start the decline into oblivion.

Also, I would imagine it's pretty cheap to host, after all it's all very simple text, I don't think it hosts any pictures beside the little Ycombinator logo in the corner :)

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