Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not asking for donations.
That's because no-one would donate to you, because you haven't done anything worthwhile. Sal Khan has.
If what he's doing is so worthwhile as you say, shouldn't he donate?
Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
181–190 of 232 posts
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#182Where your money goes is detailed here: https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ (see PDF downloads). The most recent data is from 2018, when they had an income of about 43M of which about 3.4M goes to the top 10 paid employees and the top two get 0.7M and 0.8M. The total salary budget is 35M, 25M of which are for "program services" (I guess creating content, developing the platform, etc.). This loo…
I wonder what the technology breakdown costs are? Is there anyone from KA engineering here who can satisfy our curiosity? Most of it would be outgoing bandwidth I’d think... maybe storage as well?
Our videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost.
Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage.
We're working to move to Go, which will make a big difference in this part of our bill. http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#183Ahh.. Khan Academy.. the usefulness this site provided throughout my middle and high school education. Quite frankly, it literally saved my ass. I've gone ahead and donated $1K.
Thank you so much!
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#184Ahh.. Khan Academy.. the usefulness this site provided throughout my middle and high school education. Quite frankly, it literally saved my ass. I've gone ahead and donated $1K.
Couldn't do 1k but I can do 200 right now, anything for these guys, they are doing amazing work, everyone give what you can!
Thanks! That's a generous donation
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#185Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#186If anyone from Khan Academy is reading this: I tried to donate and my transaction was flagged as "suspicious", now my card is blocked. Probably because their PSP doesn't seem to implement 3DSecure. What's grating is that after I tried to donate I had to solve a bunch of reCaptchas before it showed me the failure status.
Sorry to hear that. AFAIK, we just use Stripe, which is pretty standard.
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#187I was hoping to find more info on the "250% nominal load" mentioned in the title. However, I didn't see anything about load on the linked page, just a generic looking donation page. I'm a bit biased, because I focus on CPU efficiency for a major CDN, but I'd be super curious what exactly is at 250%? Network bandwidth? CPU? IOPS? Are there big hammers that they can use to get things back under control without adding s…
Video playing is mostly handled by YouTube.
Features which use a lot of CPU are tracking learner progress, managing classrooms, and the like. These features are really important right now as teachers have moved classes online.
We are in the process of moving this code to Go, which should still be very productive for us but also reduce how much CPU is required.
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#188I gave them about 4 pounds, the videos did help me and I feel like I have to give something back
thanks!
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#189I quite enjoyed khan academy when it was just Khan doing lectures. They were terrific. I can't imagine, though, that servers should account for any sizable amount of overall expense. Is this really an issue for them? The linked page didn't seem to talk about it.
It's our biggest expense after salaries, as noted elsewhere in the thread.
Re: Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
#190I was hoping to find more info on the "250% nominal load" mentioned in the title. However, I didn't see anything about load on the linked page, just a generic looking donation page. I'm a bit biased, because I focus on CPU efficiency for a major CDN, but I'd be super curious what exactly is at 250%? Network bandwidth? CPU? IOPS? Are there big hammers that they can use to get things back under control without adding s…
Video playing is mostly handled by YouTube. Features which use a lot of CPU are tracking learner progress, managing classrooms, and the like. These features are really important right now as teachers have moved classes online. We are in the process of moving this code to Go, which should still be very productive for us but also reduce how much CPU is required.
What language is it written in currently? Python? JavaScript?