If even rtm, tenured professor of computer science at MIT, can't escape from sysadmin duty, I really have no hope.
Compared to system administration,
being cursed forever is a step up.
HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
51–60 of 129 posts
Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
#522,000 startups will be launched on Monday morning as a result of this downtime.
... broken window fallacy ?
Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
#53Earlier 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.
Just as one example, I think you could make a fairly convincing case that the official version of git uses a "filesystem as a database" system with great success.
I doubt it would be improved by using something more "proper".
Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
#54Oh maybe on the maintenance landing page you could post up a big bunch of static links to say the top 50 most voted articles ever! (Or such like). Something like that would keep us busy for a while.
Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
#55For 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?
We currently get just over 200k uniques and just under 2m page views on weekdays (less on weekends).
Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
#56Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because you always end up building your own database out of flat files and that is always worse than using an existing one.
And yet, here you are, on a site run off a flat file database.
A commenting site that:
- Has average latency over 500ms when not under load - Performs quite poorly under load (I hate to bring it up, but the most recent example was Aaron Swartz's passing. Anyone who used HN then to get news knows how poorly HN performs under load) - Is restarted every week or two because it leaks memory - Keeps XSRF tokens in memory and loses them across restarts - Doesn't have a full markup language
HN is quite poorly-featured compared to typical commenting sites. People use HN because pg is here. He could remove half the features on the site (bold & italics... what features are there even to remove beside nested commenting?) and retain 90% of the audience.
Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, here you are, on a site run off a flat file database.
A commenting site that: - Has average latency over 500ms when not under load - Performs quite poorly under load (I hate to bring it up, but the most recent example was Aaron Swartz's passing. Anyone who used HN then to get news knows how poorly HN performs under load) - Is restarted every week or two because it leaks memory - Keeps XSRF tokens in memory and loses them across restarts - Doesn't have a full markup lang…
You're probably seeing the artificial delay introduced for commenters that can't maintain at least a 4.0 comment point average or people who aren't signed in. Site runs like butter for me.
Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
#59Re: HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the shiny new server replacing it: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Ibm_pc_51...
My guess was this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Com...
I was thinking one of these: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Bundesarc...
