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HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#32

Post by ericHosick »

pg wrote: post #7
WALoeIII wrote: post #4

Can you please post a picture of the server so we can see all the sweet LEDs on network cards?

http://imgur.com/VuSH2j5

I call foul. This doesn't even look like it's powered up.

Edit: Wow. 3.5 years on HN and my first down-voted post. I guess I should have added a sarcasm tag or stick with keeping comments "safe".

Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#35

Post by rogerbinns »

kansface wrote: post #25
abstractbill wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it be? You can get a long long way by treating the filesystem as a database. The first engineers at Amazon used the same technique a lot, as do I.

Because you always end up building your own database out of flat files and that is always worse than using an existing one.

If it was always worse then every developer doing this must be stupid. Here are some ways in which a filesystem is "better":

- Zero administration

- Only configuration setting is the directory

- Trivial to test

- Trivial to examine with existing tools, backup, modify etc

- Works with any operating system, language, platform, libraries etc

- Good performance characteristics and well tuned by the operating system

- Easy for any developer to understand

- No dependencies

- Security model is trivial to understand and is a base part of operating system

- Data is not externally accessible

Many existing databases have attributes that aren't desirable. For example they tend to care about data integrity and durability, at the expense of other things (eg increased administration, performance). For a use case like HN, losing 1 out of every 1,000 comments wouldn't be that big a deal - it isn't a bank.

Consider the development, deployment and administrative differences between doing "hello world" with a filesystem versus an existing database. Of course this doesn't always mean filesystems should be used. Developers should be practical and prudent.

TLDR: YAGNI, KISS, DTSTTCPW

Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#37

Post by GuiA »

brador wrote: post #34
e1ven wrote: post #5

For all the flak HN gets about fnid problems, etc, it's still awe-inspiring to me that such a popular site runs on a single server, with so little admintime ;)

Just how popular is HN? Anyone got info on uniques or pageviews a month?

As of October 5th 2011:

"Also, a traffic update: HN now gets over 120k unique ips on a weekday, and serves over 1.3 million page views."

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

Additionally:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com

Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

#38

Post by eclipticplane »

larrys wrote: post #14

In case anyone wondering colo place appears to be The Planet. whois -h whois.arin.net 174.132.225.106 NetRange: 174.132.0.0 - 174.133.255.255 CIDR: 174.132.0.0/15 Name: 6a.e1.84ae.static.theplanet.com Address: 174.132.225.106 OriginAS: AS36420, AS30315, AS13749, AS21844 NetName: NETBLK-THEPLANET-BLK-15 NetHandle: NET-174-132-0-0-1 Parent: NET-174-0-0-0-0 NetType: Direct Allocation RegDate: 2008-06-17 Updated: 2012-02…

*SoftLayer. ThePlanet is no longer, but a lot of their reverse DNS entries still point to .theplanet.com.
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