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My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

mark.mcnally.je

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Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#101

Post by blacklion »

nostrademons wrote: post #20

People tend to severely underestimate how fast modern machines are and overestimate how much you need to spend on hardware. Back in my last startup, I was doing a crypto market intelligence website that subscribed to full trade & order book feeds from the top 10 exchanges. It handled about 3K incoming messages/second (~260M per day), including all of the message parsing, order book update, processing, streaming to we…

Crypto markets are very small :-)

I'm working and company which process "real" exchanges, like NASDAQ, LSE, and, especially, OPRA feed.

We've added 20+ crypto exchanges in our portfolio this year, and all of them are processed on one old server which is unable to process NASDAQ Total View in real-time anymore.

On the other hand, whole OPRA feed (more than 5Gbit/s or 65B/day, yes, it is billions, messages of very optimized binary protocol, not this crappy JSON) is processed by our code on one modern server. Nothing special, two sockets of Intel Xeons (not even Platinums).

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#103

Post by gaptoothclan »

polote wrote: post #41

What's the point of this post? OP is serving a file at 50req/sec. There is not even mention of a dB query. How is that able to relate to any kind of normal app? I guess that the post was written as an answer to the mangadex post [1]. Mangadex was handling 3k req/sec involving dB queries. It was not just a cached Html page. 50req/sec for a Html file is super low which shows that a $4 month server cant do much actually…

Is this just an apache bench mark

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#106

Post by sleepyhead »

great-potential wrote: post #65
nayuki wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean use someone else's web server instead?

I mean this is just basic stuff, for me it just sounds like a developer putting a site in production, no auto-scaling, patching ... might as well outsource this to a CDN since there is no database/redis/varnish ...

So...someone else's web server instead?

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#107

Post by Zababa »

dreyfan wrote: post #23
ppeetteerr wrote: post #4

How did this make it to the number two spot on HackerNews?

Broadly speaking people on HN have no clue how to setup a performant httpd/app server and are impressed by abysmal performance/cost metrics like this or the MangaDex post. Everything these days is obscured through multiple layers of SaaS offerings and unnecessary bloat like kubernetes. ~10k rps (it was concurrent connections but close enough) was state of the art in 1999. Now 22 years later ~50 rps is somehow impress…

> ~10k rps (it was concurrent connections but close enough) was state of the art in 1999. Now 22 years later ~50 rps is somehow impressive.

I honestly don't understand how that can be true. I'm not suggesting you're lying of course, but when you put it this way it's almost like people are actively trying to slow their programs down. I have a few ideas on why that might be the case (switch to slow interpreted languages, switch to bigger web frameworks, bigger payload) but even that wouldn't explain all of it. Do you have any idea why things are this way?

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#108

Post by nostrademons »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #78
fhood wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People may underestimate how fast modern machines are, but that is probably in part because, at least in my fairly relevant experience, I have literally never seen a CPU bottleneck under normal circumstances. Memory pressure is nearly always the driving issue.

Yeah. Now that CPUs are insanely powerful and you have NVMe SSDs etc the bottleneck is always memory.

It's also amazing how much you can fit in RAM if you're careful. I remember ~2007 people were aghast at Facebook's 4T memcached deployment that stored basically everyone's social network posts; now you can get single servers for ~$4K with 4T of RAM.

The trick is basically that you have to eschew the last 15 years of "productivity" enhancements. Pretty much any dynamic language is out; if you must use the JVM or .NET, store as much as possible in flat buffers of primitive types. I ended up converting order books from the obvious representation (hashtable mapping prices to a list of Order structs) to a pair of SortedMaps from FastUtils, which provides an unboxed float representation with no pointers. That change ended up reducing memory usage by about 4x.

You can fit a lot of ints and floats in today's 100G+ machines, way more than needed to represent the entire cryptocurrency market. You just can't do that when you're chasing 3 pointers, each with their associated object headers, to store 4 bytes.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#109

Post by mark_mcnally_je »

watermelon0 wrote: post #47
dreyfan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broadly speaking people on HN have no clue how to setup a performant httpd/app server and are impressed by abysmal performance/cost metrics like this or the MangaDex post. Everything these days is obscured through multiple layers of SaaS offerings and unnecessary bloat like kubernetes. ~10k rps (it was concurrent connections but close enough) was state of the art in 1999. Now 22 years later ~50 rps is somehow impress…

I would guess this is close to a default Apache + mod_wsgi setup, and this is one of the easiest way of hosting Python web apps, so basically achievable by anyone on HN. I assume (based on 180 req/s for static page) that he is using mpm_prefork, where each Apache child handles a single connection. If he switched to mpm_event, which uses event loop like nginx, ~10k rps should easily be achievable, but I don't think WS…

Yeah it's all default apache + mod_wsgi. This is also my first Django setup and I made it over-complicated as a learning exercise. mpm_event is something I have not heard of before, thanks for bringing that to my attention.

Re: My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

#110

Post by Arch-TK »

polote wrote: post #41

What's the point of this post? OP is serving a file at 50req/sec. There is not even mention of a dB query. How is that able to relate to any kind of normal app? I guess that the post was written as an answer to the mangadex post [1]. Mangadex was handling 3k req/sec involving dB queries. It was not just a cached Html page. 50req/sec for a Html file is super low which shows that a $4 month server cant do much actually…

>There is not even mention of a dB query.

Did you read the post?

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