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What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

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Re: What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

#51

Post by jsherer »

syllogism wrote: post #46
jsherer wrote: post #3

I run Minimal Reader [1] (which has about 5k users) and I can say that running a web app like this takes a lot of time and energy keeping everything running smoothly. My service has a lot of moving parts, all of which are distributed among a couple dozen different servers. Keeping the technical infrastructure running smoothly requires a lot of data visualization of server stats, database stats, web request stats, wor…

Hey that "queue for free account" thing is brilliant . Good presentation too!

Thanks. I've signed up for a couple of services that do that. It seems to work out even though some people get a little annoyed that they have to wait.

Re: What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

#52

Post by chrissnell »

landr0id wrote: post #47
karterk wrote: post #2

The most difficult thing is going to be getting to 10K active users :) These days RAM is cheap and SSD storage is also widely available. For a very long time, one of my side projects with 50K users was hosted in a EC2 small instance. With that out of the way, here are a few things you will need to take care of: * Security (especially passwords) - Rails should take care of most of this for you, but you should ensure t…

> Logging, logging, logging - I can't stress on this enough. When things break, logging is crucial in piecing together what happened. Use log rotation to archive old logs so they don't hog the disk space. How do most people manage activity logs? Currently what we have set up is the user id (if the user is logged in), IP address, URL they hit, user agent, and timestamp are all inserted into an activity logs table. For…

Off-machine logging. There are commercial services (we're using Papertrail but there are tons of them), roll-your-own solutions (Elasticsearch-Logstash-Kibana), and simple solutions (syslog).

For an easy and simple solution, spin up a second instance and send logs to it via rsyslog over a private network interface. Most mature frameworks provide a method to send logs over syslog. It's UDP and very lightweight. Another plus: if you are compromised, you have another server with your logs and that server isn't running your vulnerable app.

Re: What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

#53

Post by jsherer »

Abundnce10 wrote: post #48
syllogism wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey that "queue for free account" thing is brilliant . Good presentation too!

I agree, I haven't seen the "Wait in line for a free account" before. Can you describe this feature in more detail? For example, how long does a user have to wait, does it allow in more users as the size of the queue grows, etc.?

It is usually set to a fixed number of users per hour with a minimum wait time. Keeps the server happy when I get HN'd/Reddit'd/etc. (Does anybody get Slashdotted anymore?)

Re: What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

#54

Post by pbreit »

karterk wrote: post #2

The most difficult thing is going to be getting to 10K active users :) These days RAM is cheap and SSD storage is also widely available. For a very long time, one of my side projects with 50K users was hosted in a EC2 small instance. With that out of the way, here are a few things you will need to take care of: * Security (especially passwords) - Rails should take care of most of this for you, but you should ensure t…

Nailed it with first sentence: it takes 10k users to run an app with 10k users! And that will be, by far, the hardest part.

The technical stuff will be pretty much trivial. Any decently constructed app on any decent framework (Rails, etc) on any decent host (AWS, DO) would be able to handle a 10k user app (probably maxing out at 1% online at same time) without breaking a sweat.

And you will have plenty of time to build out the tech because it will probably take you many months to get to even a few thousand users (depending on what kind of app it is, of course).

Re: What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

#55

Post by david_shaw »

Okay -- "what it takes" is a pretty broad question, but I'll do my best to put some thoughts together. I run a few web applications, but the most popular one is http://sleepyti.me -- with about ~50-60k views per day.

- A reliable hosting environment. I currently have a Linode VPS (basic $20 package, with $5 monthly backups) that runs http://sleepyti.me, my personal web site, an IRC server, a Mumble server, and a bunch of other stuff -- it's not even close to being maxed out resource wise, even with all the constant traffic the site is getting. It's important to remember that consistent network connectivity is a really important aspect here: a 30-minute downtime during peak hours can easily lose a lot of users. I'd say Linode is great, and I'm very happy with their service, but I also host several Sinatra web applications on a Digital Ocean VPS that only costs $5 per month (although I do my own backups, rather than using their service). I've noticed zero load-related performance impacts. Clearly, though, there is a limit to how far that can scale.

- A production web server. This probably goes without saying, but a lot of webapp developers are used to just working on their own dev environment. For my apps, I use nginx (and thin, when necessary).

- Security. Make sure that you have the basics of application security covered in your app itself. OWASP produces some pretty great "cheat sheets" that can help out in this area. Furthermore, make sure that your server is updated frequently, using SSL correctly, etc. I work in information security -- please believe me when I say that getting hacked is not something you want to deal with when you're trying to grow.

Hope this helps, and good luck with launched your apps!

Re: What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

#56

Post by jakejake »

Since the article you point to is about programming then I'd assume your asking about the technical side of things rather that actually acquiring 5-10k users (which is very difficult). It's an interesting question, but as you have it phrased it's similar to "how long is a piece of string."

Firstly, the load of a web app is going to be dictated by what the app actually does.

Also 5k-10k users should be clarified as to whether you mean total users or concurrent users. Testing capacity can be actually tricky figuring out how the number of users equates to actual hits to your servers.

As an example, we have nearly 50k accounts but on average only a few hundred are using the service at the exact same time. I would guess that our app is fairly complex compared to the average app. We run 3 app servers, 1 DB master, 1 DB slave, and 2 cache servers. Our monthly hosting bill is around $1,200.

Re: What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

#57

Post by SchizoDuckie »

rwhitman wrote: post #22

Despite what the smart engineers of HN are going to prattle on about running a web app, it's not about systems infrastructure. It's about people. 5-10K user records in the DB, relatively speaking, is a small list and can be kept on a single pretty minimal server instance. 10K user records is not the issue. It's dealing with the humans who use the app on a day to day basis. Typically getting only a small fraction of y…

I run a free product without a revenue model as well. (DuckieTV, a chrome extension / node-webkit app, http://schizoduckie.github.io/DuckieTV )

I have zero costs though, since it's serverless and all hosted on Google and Github's infrastructure.

For privacy reasons I have made the deliberate choice to not include any log reporting tools or use any tracking services that could possibly make development a whole lot easier.

Thankfully I get some support from a couple of other people that mostly help with small dev tweaks and supporting users, finding out what goes wrong and providing excellent feedback.

I can really recommend setting up a subreddit so that people can help themselves and others, and you can provide some feedback where needed.

All in all the load of user support has been quite easily manageable, though now with Trakt.TV's debacle with the new API there is definite pressure to fix things.

Re: What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

#58

Post by Gurkenmaster »

karterk wrote: post #2

The most difficult thing is going to be getting to 10K active users :) These days RAM is cheap and SSD storage is also widely available. For a very long time, one of my side projects with 50K users was hosted in a EC2 small instance. With that out of the way, here are a few things you will need to take care of: * Security (especially passwords) - Rails should take care of most of this for you, but you should ensure t…

> These days RAM is cheap

Ironicially it's a completly different story on the consumer market. I bought my two 4GB sticks about 2 years ago and now they cost twice as much. 4GB can cost you $40 which is not cheap at all.

Re: What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

#59

Post by msielski »

reymus wrote: post #42
tlack wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you won't know if your server ever sent it to Mandrill. :) Always be extremely verbose with logging!

I have always heard the opposite, that too much logging is as bad as no logging. I see the point of having the logs to be able to find out what happened, but what happens when there' s so much logging that the information needed is just buried into huge amount of noise?

This is true, without the right tools. I am moving to logstash with kibana to do this, and it's looking very promising. See http://www.elasticsearch.org/videos/kibana-logstash/

Re: What does it take to run a web app with 5K – 10K users?

#60

Post by mrbig4545 »

In my experience running https://thisaintnews.com the hardest part is getting and keeping users. It would probably be easier if I did some marketing, but that's too much like work! Still, it's not doing bad for something that's been around for 6 years, and hasn't been worked on in a year.

The second problem is motivation, after a certain amount of time, it becomes far less fun and much more of a burden, at which point you have to decide if you'll power through, give up, or quit totally.

The rest is just a software/hardware problem, and easily dealt with when needed.

As for the load, it's not that busy, but not that quiet for what it is, (http://stats.thisaintnews.com) and it runs on a cheap server from http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/, has a Xeon(R) CPU E3-1225 V2 @ 3.20GHz, 16Gb ram and 2x 1tb hdd, unlimited bandwidth and 1gbps link. It only costs about £25/month iirc.

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