

Yay! Hacker News is on a new and improved server now. - kirubakaran

"We're down for (we hope) a few minutes while switching to a new server."<p>... and they are back.<p>Thank you pg, rtm and everyone who made this happen.
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tlrobinson
_So we just finished a new round of optimizations as part of our ongoing quest
to prove that with sufficient caching you can serve arbitrarily large numbers
of requests with arbitrarily slow languages._

<http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#15jan09>

Is that quest over, or is upgrading the server fair game? :)

~~~
patio11
_with sufficient caching you can serve arbitrarily large numbers of requests_

Note the collorary: with a sufficient business model you can earn arbitrarily
large amounts of money relative to hardware costs.

Which always makes me wonder why the clooooooooooooud gets so much press for
cost reduction. If your application doesn't value data by weight (or worse,
values data at 0), your hosting costs are going to be rounding error. Reducing
the rounding error to half-sized doesn't strike me as the number one best use
of time for the majority of businesses.

~~~
tlrobinson
True, though reduced hardware cost is only part of the promise of cloud
computing.

Elastic scalability is a major advantages in some cases, allowing you to
rapidly scale up (and back down) while minimizing waste. "The cloud" absorbs
the fluctuations.

Easy deployment and thus reduced administrative costs might be another. With
EC2, etc that's might not be the case, since you still have to set up the OS
images and other infrastructure yourself, but things like Heroku might help.

------
pg
Yes, should be a lot faster. We're now just trying to kill the old one
cleanly...

~~~
pg
Looks like everything went well. Handy having Robert Morris as your sysadmin.
The new server seems to be about 2x as fast. The frontpage renders for me in
about 50 msec. But the site should seem more than 2x faster (for logged-in
users) because many requests will terminate before being interrupted.

There's now enough memory that we can fit all the links and comments in memory
at once again. We should be good for another year or so.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Thanks! Also, for those of us who don't know who Robert Morris is:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris>

* MIT Prof

* creator of first internet worm

* cofounder of viaweb and ycombinator

~~~
cperciva
_former chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division
of the National Security Agency_

That's rtm's father, not rtm.

~~~
alecco
Man, what I'd give to have a chat one day with RTM. So many questions. :)

~~~
pg
Apply to YC, and if you make it to interviews you can get grilled by him in
person.

~~~
tdavis
I seem to recall most exchanges going thusly:

    
    
      pg: Robert, do you have anything to add?
      rtm: No.
    

Though he did talk during the interview. In this age of Twitter he's my hero.

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vaksel
wonder what the server specs are...for both the new and the old one

~~~
rtm
Old: 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, 4 GB RAM, 32-bit FreeBSD 5.3.

New: 3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1.

~~~
lsb
So, if you've got all those in-memory data structures, there are lots of lists
of pointers to objects. How does it compare on a 32-bit OS, with 32-bit
pointers, vs a 64-bit with 64-bit pointers?

~~~
cperciva
I'd guess that most of the memory is used by blocks of text which are much
larger than the pointers which reference them, so probably the size_t
expansion has a minimal impact on the total memory usage.

~~~
jwilliams
That's true, but 64 bit will affect other things as well - pointer size goes
up, your stack will be bigger and the packing (alignment) of your structures
changes.

If your compiler is unfriendly, your structure size can change significantly
-- afaik, GCC is pretty clever about structure packing, but I'd imagine it
varies a lot depending on the architecture.

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rvirding
Perhaps if they had been running Erlang on the server you wouldn't have had to
take the site down while migrating to a new server. Sorry just had to point
this out

~~~
cperciva
Erlang isn't a magic bullet. It might make migrating _processes_ fast, but it
won't speed up migrating _data_.

~~~
airlabam
>>Erlang isn't a magic bullet. It might make migrating processes fast, but it
won't speed up migrating data.

Could you explain why to me? I just can't remember. I think I might be
suffering from mnesia.

~~~
radu_floricica
A link on mnesia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnesia>) would have been
helpful.

~~~
mst
Explaining a pun spoils it though.

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blueben
Why "server" instead of "servers"?

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EliAndrewC
Typically sites with multiple servers put there web and database server
software on different machines. Hacker News doesn't use a database and stores
everything in memory, so this wouldn't make any sense for this codebase.

