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Running a business means contact with reality

fredkozlowski.com

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Re: Running a business means contact with reality

#41

Post by j45 »

kragen wrote: post #39
crop_rotation wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand such comments. Obviously the people having trouble serving HN traffic have no clue what inetd is. Most of them might not even know about using varnish/nginx and that too is fine. It is good that internet is so accessible that you don't need to write shell script from inetd to express your opinions on your own domain and website. A random php running blog will be able to serve far less than 5M hits/…

Oh, I was using a shell script spawned from inetd as the lowest-tech, most primitive, worst-performance simple way of running a web server. A random PHP-running blog will easily handle tens of millions of hits a day unless you way overcomplicate it.

Millions of hits a day doesn't seem to be the correct metric for an HN front page traffic spike.

Concurrent connections per second is likely much more relevant, and in that case, one can put the most basic proxy or cache in front of the webpage to help a great deal, if not Cloudflare.

Re: Running a business means contact with reality

#42

Post by kragen »

j45 wrote: post #41
kragen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I was using a shell script spawned from inetd as the lowest-tech, most primitive, worst-performance simple way of running a web server. A random PHP-running blog will easily handle tens of millions of hits a day unless you way overcomplicate it.

Millions of hits a day doesn't seem to be the correct metric for an HN front page traffic spike. Concurrent connections per second is likely much more relevant, and in that case, one can put the most basic proxy or cache in front of the webpage to help a great deal, if not Cloudflare.

"Concurrent connections" and "connections per second" are two different measures which you are confusing. The second one is basically the same thing as "hits per day", and the first one isn't relevant.

Re: Running a business means contact with reality

#43

Post by j45 »

kragen wrote: post #39
crop_rotation wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand such comments. Obviously the people having trouble serving HN traffic have no clue what inetd is. Most of them might not even know about using varnish/nginx and that too is fine. It is good that internet is so accessible that you don't need to write shell script from inetd to express your opinions on your own domain and website. A random php running blog will be able to serve far less than 5M hits/…

Oh, I was using a shell script spawned from inetd as the lowest-tech, most primitive, worst-performance simple way of running a web server. A random PHP-running blog will easily handle tens of millions of hits a day unless you way overcomplicate it.

I can't seem to reply to the other quote.

Concurrent connections is the number of simultaneous connections a server can handle, something little wordpress sites not behind anything to help often get slammed with on the regular.

Re: Running a business means contact with reality

#44

Post by didibus »

kragen wrote: post #19
monarchwadia wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose one could argue that both are equally real.

I remember one time at summer camp in the teen dorm I claimed that pain was an illusion, because it was subjective. A girl named Lisa picked up a wooden block and threw it at me. It hit my lip, which started bleeding, and she was immediately horrified at what she had done; but I had to acknowledge that subjective "reality" has an importance to me that objective reality does not.

Pain actually has a lot of objective parts to it. There are real chemical and mechanical processes involved. You could even argue the subjective part might be smaller than people think. Mindset can change the experience, but different people might just have different "pain functions" to begin with.

Same idea with hunger and weight gain or loss. Hunger is a biological process. You can push through it, but people also experience it differently because their actual hunger mechanisms differ, not just because they "interpret" it differently.

Re: Running a business means contact with reality

#45

Post by kragen »

j45 wrote: post #43
kragen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I was using a shell script spawned from inetd as the lowest-tech, most primitive, worst-performance simple way of running a web server. A random PHP-running blog will easily handle tens of millions of hits a day unless you way overcomplicate it.

I can't seem to reply to the other quote. Concurrent connections is the number of simultaneous connections a server can handle, something little wordpress sites not behind anything to help often get slammed with on the regular.

Wordpress is kind of a pig, yeah. But unless you're running WebSocket or server-sent events or some other Comet thing from Wordpress, you can solve the concurrent-connections problem just by limiting the number of concurrent PHP processes your server runs (MaxRequestWorkers in Apache), which may or may not be set to a reasonable default like 20 normally. Additional burst clients will either pile up in the kernel's connection queue or have to retry their SYN packets if the kernel's connection queue is full.

The reason you need more than one concurrent connection (again, barring some kind of Comet) is that some clients take a significantly nonzero amount of time to finish receiving the response, at which point PHP has generally already finished executing but is still taking up RAM, which is what limits the number of concurrent connections you can handle with Wordpress. But really all you need to do is not go into swap when you hit an overload, and Bob's your uncle.

Depending on how it's configured, Wordpress may still not be able to answer new requests as soon as they come in, but that's not a problem of the number of concurrent connections; it's a problem of the number of hits per second.

You can decouple the number of concurrent connections from the amount of RAM you're burning in PHP by using FastCGI, or just plain old CGI, or nginx (with probably FastCGI), or putting a reverse proxy in front of Apache, or just about anything except mod_php, but you very rarely need to. There just aren't that many people on 14.4kbps modems any more, and your web server has literal gigabytes of RAM.

You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.

Re: Running a business means contact with reality

#46

Post by absurdcomputing »

Swizec wrote: post #13
victorbuilds wrote: post #9

After 20 years building software for other companies, I started my own thing a few weeks ago. The reality check hit fast. When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market. When it's yours, every signup or lack of one is direct feedback. No buffer.

> When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market. You can still blame the market. A good market makes everything easier, a bad market makes everything harder. But here’s the catch: You choose the market. To share an example: When I started my react teaching side business in 2015 it was so easy . Growing 2x year over year, I thought I was some kind of business genius. Then one day it stopped…

Hey! I really liked your D3 training. Was very useful at the time!

Re: Running a business means contact with reality

#47

Post by chuliomartinez »

The gold nugget here is: your number one job as the business owner is: find new customers. Forget everything else. You must find ways how to talk to them, get them to trust you and tell you about their problems.

Forget scaling, google ads, until your customer #10, probably more. All your early customers will be from your network, real people you talk to in real world.

It is a chicken and egg problem - you don’t know what product customers need until you have customers. So go find them, build and try to figure out what they have in common.

Re: Running a business means contact with reality

#48

Post by nicbou »

jmogly wrote: post #22

Some real honest and actionable advice here. I think the natural course for intelligent people that enjoy crafting things is very much in conflict with the real world. We care about the things we are building because we see them as an extension of ourselves. Anxiously perfecting our creations in a safe place, obsessing over ever smaller details of finished portions; working on detailing while ignoring the missing hal…

It's a thing I had to get over, because in the end, people were quite content with what I released and no one minded if I shipped an extra 25kb to the browser or did not have consistently rounded corners.

I learned that lesson again with art. You have to frequently zoom out and see if the entire picture works, or otherwise you make highly detailed turds.

Re: Running a business means contact with reality

#49

Post by kragen »

didibus wrote: post #44
kragen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember one time at summer camp in the teen dorm I claimed that pain was an illusion, because it was subjective. A girl named Lisa picked up a wooden block and threw it at me. It hit my lip, which started bleeding, and she was immediately horrified at what she had done; but I had to acknowledge that subjective "reality" has an importance to me that objective reality does not.

Pain actually has a lot of objective parts to it. There are real chemical and mechanical processes involved. You could even argue the subjective part might be smaller than people think. Mindset can change the experience, but different people might just have different "pain functions" to begin with. Same idea with hunger and weight gain or loss. Hunger is a biological process. You can push through it, but people also…

I don't care about the objective parts; the chemical and mechanical processes would have been exactly the same if it had been Lisa's lip that was bruised and bleeding instead of my own, or the lip of another boy halfway around the world, but it wouldn't have mattered to me in the same way.
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