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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

#71

Post by nonamegiven »

rogerbinns wrote: post #35
kansface wrote: post #25

Earlier 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.

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 - Eas…

TIL: DTSTTCPW

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

#72

Post by nonamegiven »

badgar wrote: post #57
saraid216 wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

Actually I'd never heard of pg or YC until they bubbled up into my consciousness from reading HN.

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

#73

Post by glesica »

badgar wrote: post #57
saraid216 wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

I didn't even know who pg was until I'd been using this site for years. So no.

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

#76

Post by jrajav »

rdl wrote: post #61

Given that you've got performance issues and a fairly limiting deployment model, I never understood why you didn't get the most absurdly overpowered machine possible. (I assume you're not, because if you were, you'd be upgrading every ~6mo or so as faster single-core machines come out)

Would the CPU really be the bottleneck for HN?

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

#77

Post by batgaijin »

GuiA wrote: post #37
brador wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

don't you dare mention alexa stats here

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

#78

Post by ghshephard »

robbiep wrote: post #39

Do you think you could go down for a week? That's generally how long I need to break an addiction

Add me to the list - I'm in for $100 if we can make it a one week outage. $250 if we can stretch it out to two weeks.

I'm sorry, but 10 minutes on a saturday morning does nothing for me.

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

#79

Post by noonespecial »

saraid216 wrote: post #28
kansface wrote: post #25

Earlier 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.

Just a nitpick. A "flat file" database suggests encoding all the data to a single file.

Using a files system as a database is a little different as file systems are databases in their own right.

The question to ask is "is the data I want to store in my 'database' enough like the data stored in a filesystem that I can just use the filesystem as my database?"

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

#80

Post by GuiA »

batgaijin wrote: post #77
GuiA wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

don't you dare mention alexa stats here

Why? (genuine question)
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