About 4chans current stats and infrastructure • Hacker News Board

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#51

Post by eastdakota » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:18 PM UTC

druiid wrote: post #46

trotsky wrote: post #9

How on earth does Cloudfare survive charging $200 for nearly 2PB of traffic? Is the profiling/retargeting business really that lucrative? Do big accounts like that have some kind of revshare deal or mandatory link skimming?

To be honest I don't personally think the traffic that some of the accounts running under the free/$20 plans are sustainable. I know for my part we've been running several very large sites through their service which cut our bandwidth usage approximately in half. That's the level of bandwidth that was costing about $3k+ all by itself per month. Doing the math, I think regardless of Cloudflare and their economies of s…

You underestimate the positive effect massive scale has in the bandwidth market.

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#52

Post by runn1ng » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:27 PM UTC

talloaktrees wrote: post #16

I've always seen 4chan as the scumhole of the internet. It scares me that it's so huge. Do I have a wrong impression of it?

To add to what has been said - on 4chan, the very "controversial" topics are beaten over and over and over again.

Go to /pol/ and you will see at least two rasict threads at any given moment, then some other name-calling and misoginy. Go to /g/ and you will see non-stop dumb OS wars ("Mac OS X sucks!" - "STFU, your mother is a whore"), and so on.

Feminism, homosexuality, religion, those topics are always popular no matter the board.

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#53

Post by Karunamon » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:45 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #42

purephase wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, no. I think it's size is more indicative of the standard age range it draws (a younger audience). People keep telling me that there are decent parts of the place. Each time I try to venture in it is such a dizzying mess that I stopped trying. It makes me feel old.

I've seen a bunch of people recommend /tg/ (tabletop gaming), that it was totally different from the awful parts of 4chan. I went there, and I think I had to scroll down half a page to see people tossing around f-g and f-ggot. Yeah, no thanks. I still think "Reddit for grownups" is a potentially viable business. A semi-moderated community of communities with no tolerance for low-effort garbage or trolling. As it is n…

Something Awful on particular subforums are good for this. It has its nonsense areas just like 4chan and Reddit, but it's worth a look. Catchphrases, trolling, low-content and the like are heavily policed.

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#54

Post by TimothyFitz » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:45 PM UTC

One really impressive thing to me about 4chan's infrastructure: All traffic is served via 4 machines. Two webservers, a database and an admin/cron box. 22M uniques on 4 machines is insane. Hopefully Chris will write more about his setup some day. (Note: these boxes were directly serving all traffic up until ~6 months ago when Cloudflare was introduced)

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#55

Post by danvideo » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:49 PM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #45

danvideo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare offers a good value, but not having things like html caching is frustrating and one of the reasons we're not using them.

Actually CloudFlare does do HTML caching. Details are here: http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pagerules-advanced-ca...

ok thanks, didn't realize that had changed, will revisit

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#56

Post by tlack » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:55 PM UTC

Does anyone have any information about their database and the rest of the software that runs the site? Caching methods, if any? 4chan's stats vs their hardware and cost structure is mind blowing to me.

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#57

Post by dm8 » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:56 PM UTC

Thats interesting. And 4chan had only one guy (moot) managing all of this makes it even more impressive.

By the way, some of the posters commenting on 4chan degrading morality. This is an anon forum and its just a reflection of our society! The Guardian summarized 4chan as "lunatic, juvenile... brilliant, ridiculous and alarming". Perhaps the best description for 4chan.

And remember 4chan gave us LolCats, Memes, Rage faces etc.