Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

So what happened to the HN server?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 133 posts

Re: So what happened to the HN server?

#21

Post by tferris »

Saturday, I thought: "This guy (PG) is really brave, everybody is nowadays using virtualized server environments on mulit-core machines and PG just gets some bare metal and puts his app on one core and one thread. WTF, this guy is a genius, single-threaded apps on bare metal FTW, this is so great and I am doing this too."

After seeing this thing down for several hours -- and Google hate downtimes, they punish you instantly -- I think: "Maybe not."

However, happy to hear what went wrong and why we still should go for the bare metal thing.

Re: So what happened to the HN server?

#22

Post by viraptor »

level09 wrote: post #8
JosephRedfern wrote: post #2

There was a post about it recently (advising that there would be downtime) - they've upgraded. It's considerably quicker now!

isn't a bit long for a server upgrade ? shouldn't be there better strategies for quick switching ?

Yes they are and they're applied to critical systems. I doubt HN is regarded as such. Especially if it would require splitting backend/frontend servers and replicating both to do step by step upgrade of each component.

Alternatively you know... you can just accept that the service will be down for an hour or two and most people wouldn't even notice without this post.

Re: So what happened to the HN server?

#23

Post by lucb1e »

neilkelty wrote: post #16
level09 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't a bit long for a server upgrade ? shouldn't be there better strategies for quick switching ?

Are you paying for this?

What would you say if Google.com was down for 2 hours due to a server upgrade? Do you pay Google for searching?

Bonus points if you do actually. Their search API is limited to 100 a day, which is not a lot.

Re: So what happened to the HN server?

#25

Post by andrewcooke »

dotmanish wrote: post #12

More importantly, why isn't there a status page for something that's equivalent to a lifesaving drug for many?

use twitter - there were various things there, including an explanation from pg and some people recommending alternatives.

https://twitter.com/search?q=hacker%20news&src=typd

Re: So what happened to the HN server?

#27

Post by supercoder »

tferris wrote: post #21

Saturday, I thought: "This guy (PG) is really brave, everybody is nowadays using virtualized server environments on mulit-core machines and PG just gets some bare metal and puts his app on one core and one thread. WTF, this guy is a genius, single-threaded apps on bare metal FTW, this is so great and I am doing this too." After seeing this thing down for several hours -- and Google hate downtimes, they punish you ins…

the site actually runs very quickly, so can't argue it needs more cores / threads.

seems the issue was more with the migration.

so i reckon you're good to get back to removing all the threads from your apps :)

Re: So what happened to the HN server?

#29

Post by tferris »

supercoder wrote: post #27
tferris wrote: post #21

Saturday, I thought: "This guy (PG) is really brave, everybody is nowadays using virtualized server environments on mulit-core machines and PG just gets some bare metal and puts his app on one core and one thread. WTF, this guy is a genius, single-threaded apps on bare metal FTW, this is so great and I am doing this too." After seeing this thing down for several hours -- and Google hate downtimes, they punish you ins…

the site actually runs very quickly, so can't argue it needs more cores / threads. seems the issue was more with the migration. so i reckon you're good to get back to removing all the threads from your apps :)

I totally agree, this new machine is so fricking responsive that I still think bare metal rules but I am just so afraid of the system operations of such a machine. But maybe Paul can give us some hints and why it's still worth to go the bare metal route.

EDIT: since Heroku fooled Rapgenius and us all it would be one more reason to get into system operations again and host on bare metal.

Post reply on HN