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What caused that outage

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: What caused that outage

#11
post #10
post #8

Why was the site using a 32-bit environment to begin with? Opterons have been cheap for years now, and all new Xeons are capable of 64-bit operation.

What chip in put out in the last 2 years or so couldn't run a 64 bit system? I'm pretty sure most of the AMD chips could... Edit: By chip I mean one for a desktop CPU, e.g. Atom don't count.

Atom 330 is also 64-bit.

Re: What caused that outage

#14

I thought 32-bit addressing gave 4GB of addresses…is there some sort of flag that's taking one bit? Not trying to be a smartass, just curious about the discrepancy.

It does give 4 GB of addressable space, but many things are memory mapped by the OS, and so on a 32-bit system you end up with anywhere from 2.8 to 3.5 GB of addressable memory.

Re: What caused that outage

#15

I thought 32-bit addressing gave 4GB of addresses…is there some sort of flag that's taking one bit? Not trying to be a smartass, just curious about the discrepancy.

The OS sometimes reserves quite a chunk. For example, Windows XP really only has 2.25GB available. Putting more RAM in is pretty useless unless you switch to 64-bit.

Re: What caused that outage

#17
post #14

I thought 32-bit addressing gave 4GB of addresses…is there some sort of flag that's taking one bit? Not trying to be a smartass, just curious about the discrepancy.

It does give 4 GB of addressable space, but many things are memory mapped by the OS, and so on a 32-bit system you end up with anywhere from 2.8 to 3.5 GB of addressable memory.

So by 2GB he meant usable, not addressable? I understand that addressable RAM != 4GB due to graphics card memory, BIOS, etc. but 2GB is way less than you could get on a 32-bit server. I just wanted to understand if there's something I'm missing.

Re: What caused that outage

#19

I thought 32-bit addressing gave 4GB of addresses…is there some sort of flag that's taking one bit? Not trying to be a smartass, just curious about the discrepancy.

dynamic languages end up using more memory, because extra information has to be stored about each item (I.e. Type, tc info, etc).

Re: What caused that outage

#20
post #3

That's what happens when you make something in a new and unproven language. And I think that it deserves tremendous respect that you have done so. You could have hacked HN in python (or lisp?) in a weekend with the knowledge that it would scale, yet you decided to go with Arc. Very bold. And a great way to battletest a new language. It's great to see people eat their own dogfood.

If I'm not mistaken, "to battletest a new language" was the purpose of building this.
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