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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

#171

Post by blacklion »

blibble wrote: post #155
blacklion wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"old skool" exchanges uses either FIX (old and really vernose), FAST (binary encoding for FIX) or custom fixed-layout protocols. Most big USA exchanges uses custom fixed-layout protocols, where each message is described in documentation, but not in machine-readable way. European ones still use FAST. I didn't seen FIX in the wild for data feeds, but it is used for brokers, to submit orders to exchange (our company did…

there's still ascii FIX floating around on the market data side for a few esoteric venues FAST is not particularly common in Europe the large European venues use fixed-width binary encoding (LSE group, Euronext, CBOE Europe)

Eurex uses FAST for sure, but I can be wrong about "common".

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

#173

Post by remram »

floren wrote: post #18
fbrchps wrote: post #12

I understand your excitement for being able to handle a decent amount of requests on such a small server, but just like many other websites that get on the frontpage of HN, your site is taking multiple seconds to load for me, depending on when I refresh. As you said in your post, adding caching to your site increased your throughput by ~20% (or +10/req/sec). What you and other sites seem to lack is a more distributed…

Looks fine over here, and he doesn't have to route through a fucking Internet gatekeeper like Cloudflare or Amazon... let's enjoy this golden era before Chrome starts flagging any site which isn't fronted by a "reputable" cache like Cloudflare, Amazon, or whatever Google decides to introduce.

Google Cloud CDN? https://cloud.google.com/cdn/

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

#174

Post by lost-found »

Foomf wrote: post #162
blacklion wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opti…

I've read your few posts a few times and I'm still not sure why you made your post. You're telling the person that you handle more data than them and thus need more resources than them. Was your goal to smugly belittle them? It's not like they said any problem can be solved on their specific resources.

They are just pointing out the size of crypto market data vs normal market data. I found it interesting, not their fault you didn’t.

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

#175

Post by blacklion »

Foomf wrote: post #162
blacklion wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opti…

I've read your few posts a few times and I'm still not sure why you made your post. You're telling the person that you handle more data than them and thus need more resources than them. Was your goal to smugly belittle them? It's not like they said any problem can be solved on their specific resources.

Nope, I want to say, that even much more data could be processed on very limited hardware, and that it is additional confirmation that current hardware is immensely powerful and very under-estimated.

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

#176

Post by tiew9Vii »

fbrchps wrote: post #12

I understand your excitement for being able to handle a decent amount of requests on such a small server, but just like many other websites that get on the frontpage of HN, your site is taking multiple seconds to load for me, depending on when I refresh. As you said in your post, adding caching to your site increased your throughput by ~20% (or +10/req/sec). What you and other sites seem to lack is a more distributed…

It sounds like they are caching database queries.

> Parts of the blog posts are cached using memcached for 10 mins

That means Django needs to accept the request, route it, pull the data from memcached, render the template.

For such a site I'd just set the `Cache-Control` headers and stick Varnish in-front of it acting as a reverse proxy. That'd likely increase the page load times significantly and make the backend simpler not worrying about manually caching in memcached and just setting the correct `Cache-Control` http header.

As it's budget hosting i'd probably not even bother with Varnish and outsource that to Cloudflares generous free tier, it's cheating as your server (Origin) isn't doing 4.2m requests but the practicality is really convenient.

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

#177

Post by goodpoint »

modeless wrote: post #147

You don't need £4. As long as you can structure your site as a set of static files with interactivity done client side, even if some of the files change every minute or two, you can serve everything for $0 with Cloudflare in front of any free host. I've served 1M pageviews a day for $0 with Cloudflare + App Engine free tier and there's no reason it wouldn't scale to 100M or beyond.

No thanks. Cloudflare is very harmful to Tor and to user's freedom and privacy in general.

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

#178

Post by dimitrios1 »

VintageCool wrote: post #166
danudey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that is due to absolutely lousy code. We had a system management backend at my last company. Loading the users list was unbearably slow; 10+ seconds on a warm cache. Not too terrible, except that most user management tasks required a page reload, so it was just wildly infuriating. Eventually I took a look at the code for the page, which queried LDAP for user data and the database for permissions data. It did…

I did some work to improve performance on a dashboard several years ago. The way the statistics were queried was generally terrible, so I spent some time setting up aggregations and cleaning that up, but then... the performance was still terrible. It turned out that the dashboard had been built on top of Wordpress. The way that it checked if the user had permission to access the dashboard was to query all users, join…

If I look at traces of all the service calls at my company within our microservices environment, the "meat" of each service is a fraction of the latency -- the part that's actually fetching the data from a database, or running an intense calculation. Often times its between 20-40ms

Everything else are network hops and what I call "distributed clutter", including authorizing via a third party like Auth0 multiple times for machine-to-machine token (because "zero trust"!), multiple parameter store calls, hitting a dcache, if interacting with a serverless function, cold starts, API gateway latency, etc...

So for the meat of a 20-40 ms call, we get about a 400ms-2s backend response time.

Then if you are loading a front end SPA with javascript...fugetaboutit it

But DevOps will say "but my managed services and infinite scalability!"

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

#179

Post by diath »

jfrunyon wrote: post #84
ijidak wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a single server run millions of active connections? Wouldn't you run out of TCP sockets? What am I missing?

I would guess they may be muxed over fewer sockets, by their LBs, but that's not strictly necessary. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "run out of TCP sockets", but theoretically speaking, the only limitation is how much memory is available to store the necessary info about the socket (like address/protocol info and process info). In practice, OS's do have a "max socket" or "max FD" limit, but that's usually conf…

> I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "run out of TCP sockets", but theoretically speaking, the only limitation is how much memory is available to store the necessary info about the socket (like address/protocol info and process info).

Probably the 65k port limit since each connection will get assigned a remote port, which can be solved by binding to multiple local ports and using a load balancer in front or using multiple network interfaces.

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

#180

Post by Matthias1 »

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…

I generally agree with your comment. But the point here is not this is cutting edge performance or anything, but rather that people on HN know how to set up this type of website.

If you have any tips on how to get ~10k rps (or even a more reasonable improvement) on a £4 a month server, I at least would be very interested in hearing about them.

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