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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

#22

Post by mark_mcnally_je »

johnklos wrote: post #6

This is a good, simple way to show how much can be done with modest resources. Sometimes we see people fetishizing bigger and faster, then gatekeeping when people want to do the same work with modest means, whether it a four quid a month hosting service or a first generation Raspberry Pi. Not everyone has the money or desire for bigger & faster, and it's nice to see that here.

That's why I made this post, was very happy to see how much it could theoretically handle.

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

#23

Post by dreyfan »

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 impressive.

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

#25

Post by fbrchps »

mark_mcnally_je wrote: post #19
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…

Yeah if I was building a business website I would want distributed caching/a CDN, mainly to support spikes, like what is happening now!

Working in the space, that's one of the more frustrating things to see on HN/Reddit/etc. It's not a complex or niche thing, and especially for sites that only make profit when people can actually visit them, it's kind of a necessity to stay up as much as possible.

(Obviously the sales thing doesn't apply to OP)

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

#26

Post by jka »

There are a few comments in here that predictably suggest that simple static sites can handle large request rates easily.

Sure, that's true - but to try to progress the conversation: how would you measure the complexity of serving web requests, in order to perform more advanced cost comparisons?

(bandwidth wouldn't be quite right.. or at least not sufficient - maybe something like I/O, memory and compute resource used?)

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

#27

Post by fridif »

crazy_horse wrote: post #17
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…

200 rps is not great.

Wikipedia as a whole has 8k rps, and that's with multiple racks in multiple data centers.

I haven't read recently, but they were only doing 200 rps per server.

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

#28

Post by fabian2k »

50 rps not that much, though of course easily sufficient for many situations. This is also Django which certainly isn't the fastest choice. I played around with it a long time ago and liked it quite a bit, but you don't choose Django for performance but for the other benefits.

I'm really more surprised that static serving is so slow at 180 rps. This should be able to easily saturate the network, statically serving files is very, very fast. From what I see in the blog I doubt that the files are very large, so there is probably some other bottleneck or I'm missing something here.

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