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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

#291

Post by noduerme »

Gepsens wrote: post #286
noduerme wrote: post #268

When I launched my former bitcoin casino in 2011 (it's gone, but it was a casino where all games, even roulette tables were multiplayer, on a platform built from scratch starting in '08), I handled all web requests through a server in Costa Rica that cost about $6/mo. Where I had a shell corporation for $250/year. Once the front end -- the bullet containing the entire casino code, about 250kb -- loaded, from Costa Ri…

You're a fricking genius.

Sarcasm much? I'm a full blown idiot. I was just solving one problem at a time.

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

#292

Post by wiz21c »

noduerme wrote: post #268

When I launched my former bitcoin casino in 2011 (it's gone, but it was a casino where all games, even roulette tables were multiplayer, on a platform built from scratch starting in '08), I handled all web requests through a server in Costa Rica that cost about $6/mo. Where I had a shell corporation for $250/year. Once the front end -- the bullet containing the entire casino code, about 250kb -- loaded, from Costa Ri…

Does this article count as "Cost Rica leaks ?"

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

#293

Post by noduerme »

wiz21c wrote: post #292
noduerme wrote: post #268

When I launched my former bitcoin casino in 2011 (it's gone, but it was a casino where all games, even roulette tables were multiplayer, on a platform built from scratch starting in '08), I handled all web requests through a server in Costa Rica that cost about $6/mo. Where I had a shell corporation for $250/year. Once the front end -- the bullet containing the entire casino code, about 250kb -- loaded, from Costa Ri…

Does this article count as "Cost Rica leaks ?"

yeah, I'm blowing my HN cover.

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

#294

Post by wiz21c »

SNosTrAnDbLe wrote: post #238
mynameisash wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.[0] I'm more than a little annoyed that so much data engineering is still done in Scala Spark or PySpark. Both suffer from pretty high memory overhead, which leads to suboptimal resource utilization. I've worked with a few different systems that compile their queries into C/C++ (which is transparent to the developer). Those tend to be significantly faster or can use fewer nodes to p…

I work in the Analytics space and been mostly on Java and I am so glad that other people feel the same. At this point, people have become afraid of suggesting something other than Spark. I see something written in Rust to be much better at problems like this. I love the JVM but it works well with transactional workloads and starts showing its age when its dealing with analytical loads. The worst thing is then people…

I guess your company is running on Java and running something else would cost a lot in training, recruiting, understanding, etc. But down the line, defeating the JVM will be understood only by the guy who did it... Then that guy will leave... Then the newcomers will rewrite the thing in Spark 'cos it will feel safer. Rinse-repeat...

(I'm totally speculating, but your story seems so true that it inspired me :-)

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

#295

Post by nicbou »

idworks1 wrote: post #128

One of my proudest moment in my career is when I lowered our app processing time from ~8hrs to 17 minutes. When I deployed my first update, it reduced it to 2 hours. The sysadmin immediately contacted me that there was something unusual. I confirmed the results but he was skeptical. Then with my second update, he told me that the app must be broken or that the script must be dying. There is no way it could complete t…

I've done something like that at my last university internship. I wrote about it here: https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/pratt-whitney-redesign

It's the same story as yours, but with human effort. I was about to cut the human out entirely, and fix a ton of errors in the process.

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

#296

Post by ingas »

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…

In 2001 we started a GSM-operator on Compaq Server (it was before they were bought by HP) with whole 1Gb(!) of RAM and 2x10Gb SCSI disks.

It served up to 70K of subscribers, call center with 30-40 employees, payment systems integration, everything.

Next was 8 socket Intel server. We were never able to saturate it's CPUs - 300 Mhz (or was it 400 ?) bus was a stopper. It served 350-400K of subscribers.

And next: we changed architecture and used 2 servers with 2 socket Intel CPUs again but that was time when Ghz frequencies appeared on market. We dreamed about 4xAMD server. We came to ~1 mln of active subscribers.

Nowadays: every phone has more power than it was those servers. Typical react application consumes more resources than billing system. Gigabyte here, gigabyte there - nobody counts them.

/grumpy oldster mode

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

#297

Post by softveda »

Waterluvian wrote: post #191
mynameisash wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.[0] I'm more than a little annoyed that so much data engineering is still done in Scala Spark or PySpark. Both suffer from pretty high memory overhead, which leads to suboptimal resource utilization. I've worked with a few different systems that compile their queries into C/C++ (which is transparent to the developer). Those tend to be significantly faster or can use fewer nodes to p…

What reminded me of this the other day is how MacOS will grow your cursor if you “shake” it to help you find it on a big screen. I was thinking about how they must have a routine that’s constantly taking mouse input, buffering history, and running some algorithm to determine when user input is a mouse “shake”. And how many features like this add up to eat up a nontrivial amount of resources.

And yet MacOS doesn't allow to change the cursor color. On my Windows 10 desktop I set the cursor color to a slightly larger size and yellow color. So much easier to work with.

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

#298

Post by jbboehr »

benhoyt wrote: post #201
simonw wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Django's prefetch_related mechanism essentially implements the pattern you describe here for you: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/models/querysets/#...

Thanks. Yeah, I think I used that years ago when I first ran into this problem, and it worked well. Whether one uses an ORM or not, one needs to know how to use one's tools. My problem (not just with Django, but with ORMs in general) is how they make bad code look good. Like the following (I don't know Django well anymore, but something like this): users = User.objects.all() for u in user: print(u.name, len(u.comment…

My SQL is a bit rusty, but, to reduce the queries even further, I think you can do:

> SELECT user_id, COUNT(*) FROM comments WHERE user_id IN $1 GROUP BY user_id

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

#299

Post by Zababa »

yc12340 wrote: post #288
Zababa wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought you meant from 10k to 50 rps doing the same work, not that most of the work could be avoided in the first place. > Is this stuff not being learned? I don't know if it is. I recently finished my studies, and most people had no curiosity at all. As in, they learned a framework early, used it everywhere, and got a job using it. I do remember reading a few times on tutorial that you should put a Nginx as revers…

> On the other hand, having the wisdom of knowing what can be static in the first place? I don't think that it's something teached. All traffic is static by definition. You are not modifying bytes when they are in transit to user. And you don't have to serve different bytes each microsecond just because users want to be "up-to-date". The network latency is usually around 40ms or so. If your website serves 1000s of re…

I didn't know about ETag, thank you for that.

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

#300

Post by Zababa »

ratww wrote: post #214
Zababa wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ~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 language…

It's death by a thousand paper cuts. Lots of things that aren't really that slow in isolation, but in aggregate (or under pressure) they slow down the system and become impossible to measure. Let's do web development. Since you mentioned payloads: today they're bigger, and often come with redundant fields, or sometimes they're not even paginated! This slows down the database I/O, requires more cache space, slows down…

That's interesting, thanks for sharing.

> All those things are very simple, and you certainly know all of them.

I wonder about that. Most of the people I graduated with didn't know about complexity. Some had never touched a relational database, most probably didn't know about views. I doubt most of them knew what serialization mean.

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