Ask HN: HN web stack?

silentbicycle wrote: post #5

No database. Just flat files cached in memory on demand, IIRC. I think about that when people worry about scalability. HN seems to do okay.

using flat files just seems crazy to me, but HN seems to be doing it well.

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#9

Post by jjoe » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 3:36 AM UTC

It's running the Arc web server, which has its own implementation of the HTTP protocol. I don't think there's anything behind or in front of it. Probably not even Memcached. Think of the app serving HN as a framework. Here's how a "URL" entry would be implemented in Arc:

(defop hi req (prn "Hi there"))

http://news.ycombinator.com/whoami will return your login and IP. It's probably implemented in this fashion:

(defop whoami req (prn (req 'ip)) (prn (req 'id)))

Regards

Joe

Re: Ask HN: HN web stack?

#10

Post by kaiser_pelagic » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 3:38 AM UTC

Darmani wrote: post #2

http://www.arclanguage.com/install You can read the source code yourself. I don't remember the database, but it's running on an Arc server.

I have taken a look at the source, but wasn't sure if they were using all of it in production. If they are then quite impressive.