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Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

spliit.app

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Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#51

Post by lccerina »

carlosjobim wrote: post #22

Yet another testimony to how utterly few people are willing to pay for what they use in the abuse system called "open source". People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind! > A short disclaimer: I don’t need donations to make Spliit work. I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn to the community. And thi…

"Open source will finally die" said on a website likely running on some linux-based server, with some JS frontend, some open source/commercially licensed DB, and communicating with protocols regulated by a non-profit organization. Also in the future maybe reading this page from a device using a RISC-V processor. Sure.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#52

Post by codazoda »

scastiel wrote: post #3
Dachande663 wrote: post #2

I love the idea of this but, given the traffic numbers, this could run on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet and have the same result. They've burnt over a grand just to use vercel. Maybe I'm just older but I don't understand the logic here. A basic VPS, setup once, would have the same result and would be neutral in cost (it's how I run my own little free apps). Maybe the author is lucky enough that $100/mo doesn't really af…

Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet? I'd be very curious to see that ;) The web hosting costs basically nothing. Most of the cost comes from the database.

I think it would be fine. I run a little private analytics service for my own websites. That service isn't as busy but handles ~11k requests per month. It logs to a SQLite database. It does this on a little Raspberry Pi 400 in my home office and it's not too busy. The CPU sits at 1% to 3% on average. Obviously there are a lot of differences in my setup but I would think you could handle 10x the traffic with a small VPS without any trouble at all.

You can read a little bit more about my analytics setup here:

https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#53

Post by wongarsu »

ndriscoll wrote: post #23
rikafurude21 wrote: post #19

For reference, 100 dollars a month gets you this bare metal server on hetzner: Intel® Core™ i9-13900, 64 GB DDR5 ECC, 2 x 1.92 TB ... Should be more than enough to handle 2 requests per minute, could probably handle 100x of that.

My i5-6600k at home can handle ~15k requests per second for a toy social media app with postgresql assembling the xml to send to the client (though I've done some batching optimization and used rust for my application server to hit that). Passmark cpubenchmark suggests a 13900 should be 6-8x more capable than that. So it should be able to handle somewhere in the ballpark of 2,000,000x the required load, or maybe 100,…

If you're on Hetzner you can get a load balancer with TLS termination for $5/month. It's hidden in the cloud category but fully supports dedicated servers.

Of course doing SSL on the server itself is more secure, but if that's a performance bottleneck the load balancer can be a cost effective compromise

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#54

Post by ffsm8 »

ndriscoll wrote: post #42
9dev wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace. And that makes perfect sense. Why should humans inconvenience themselves to please the machine? If anyone’s at fault, it’s the database for not being smart enough to optimize the query on its own.

At my last job, we had architects pushing to make everything into microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability (and understanding and maintainability and operations and ability for developers to actually run/test the code). The database can't do anything to help you when you split your queries onto different db instances on different VMs for no reason. I heard we had a 7…

> ... microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability

Heh, remind me of a discussion I had with a coworker roughly 6 month ago. I tried to explain to them that the ability to scale each microservices separately almost never improves the actual performance of the platform as a whole - after all, you still need to have network calls between each service and could've also just started the monolith twice. And that would've most likely even needed less RAM too, even if each instance will likely consume more - after all, you now need less applications running to serve the same request.

This discussion took place in the context of a b2e saas platform with very moderate usage, almost everything being plain CRUD. Like 10-15k simultaneous users making data entries etc.

I'm always unsure how I should feel after such discussions. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure he probably thinks that I'm dumb for not getting microservices. On the other hand... Well... ( ꈍ ᴗ ꈍ )

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#56

Post by carlosjobim »

lccerina wrote: post #51
carlosjobim wrote: post #22

Yet another testimony to how utterly few people are willing to pay for what they use in the abuse system called "open source". People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind! > A short disclaimer: I don’t need donations to make Spliit work. I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn to the community. And thi…

"Open source will finally die" said on a website likely running on some linux-based server, with some JS frontend, some open source/commercially licensed DB, and communicating with protocols regulated by a non-profit organization. Also in the future maybe reading this page from a device using a RISC-V processor. Sure.

I hope it brings a tear of joy to the corner of the eyes of those selfless FOSS programmers that they've done their share to help Y Combinator be worth $600 000 000 000. That money is surely better spent on people who deserve it better.
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