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HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

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121–129 of 129 posts

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

#121
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A worthwhile criticism, except... How many ads do you see on HN? What's the ad revenue? What are the operating costs?

So, to reiterate your argument: 1. We don't matter to pg because we don't generate profit and are instead a slow drain on resources 2. Therefore this site must be a relic of the 90s written in an ad-hoc collection of mzscheme macros

That's a completely accurate mischaracterization of what I've said, yes.

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

#122
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We currently get just over 200k uniques and just under 2m page views on weekdays (less on weekends).

Does a single server support this level of traffic? That is pretty impressive - it would be great to learn about the server's hardware and software configuration.

Old server: two Xeon E5450 chips, 3.0 GHz, 8 cores total, 24 GB RAM.

New server: one Xeon E5-2690 chip, 2.9 GHz, 8 cores total, 32 GB RAM.

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

#123

Hi. Could someone please explain to me why it is necessary for a service (e.g. HN) to go down while people play with the (increasingly amorphous and abstract) back end? Is it 1990? Sorry, just hit a nerve. Like doing some OS updates (Windows) and then needing to reboot to "complete the installation". I'm sorry. That totally sucks.

Because the single server that runs it is being turned off and another one is being turned on? Its probably not worth the time to write something to sync processor state from one to the other or clone some sort of vmotion type thing.

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

#124
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Without meaning to sound snarky or anything, isn’t there something else at work if you have to externally block sites to stop you procrastinating? I would have thought getting to the root cause of your “HN addiction” would probably be a better alternative.

OK, I'll bite: how do I go about finding the root cause?

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

#125
post #58
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that your average is below 4.0, this hypothesis seems questionable. Can you give a cite for this 4.0 rule?

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My router at home blocks Reddit and HN except from 5-7pm and 11:45-midnight (and all day Saturday). Worked amazingly well to cut back the addiction. Now if I could just get HTTPS blocking to work on FB and Twitter.

I do the same. It works pretty well, it's crazy when you start catching yourself trying to go to one of them by habit.

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

#127
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a single server support this level of traffic? That is pretty impressive - it would be great to learn about the server's hardware and software configuration.

Old server: two Xeon E5450 chips, 3.0 GHz, 8 cores total, 24 GB RAM. New server: one Xeon E5-2690 chip, 2.9 GHz, 8 cores total, 32 GB RAM.

Wow, nice, that was exactly the HW I was predicting; the fastest single-core-performance xeon under turboboost.

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My router at home blocks Reddit and HN except from 5-7pm and 11:45-midnight (and all day Saturday). Worked amazingly well to cut back the addiction. Now if I could just get HTTPS blocking to work on FB and Twitter.

I do the same. It works pretty well, it's crazy when you start catching yourself trying to go to one of them by habit.

I don't know why but I find myself opening new tabs without thinking about it. On Facebook? Ctrl+T, fa, down arrow, enter. Why? Who knows, I was already there... That's when I noticed that I have some major problems.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Files???? That's a joke right???

I find it interesting how easy it is to criticize a functioning system based on some aspect of non-conformance with some hypothetical ideal. The idea that HN wouldn't run on a database is no less astounding than the idea that much of facebook runs on PHP. Design of real systems is often messy and imperfect and deviates from the ideal due to necessity of optimizing one or another factor that may not be obvious.

Facebook doesn't run on PHP and hasn't for a while... Its compiled C.
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