
HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers - pg
Rtm has lined up a new, faster server for us.  He currently plans to switch over to it at 6 am EST on Saturday.  He says the site will be down for around 10 minutes, but you know how these things go...
======
jey
If even rtm, tenured professor of computer science at MIT, can't escape from
sysadmin duty, I really have no hope.

~~~
jacques_chester

        Compared to system administration, 
        being cursed forever is a step up.
    

\-- Paul Tomko

------
robbiep
Do you think you could go down for a week?

That's generally how long I need to break an addiction

~~~
ghshephard
Add me to the list - I'm in for $100 if we can make it a one week outage. $250
if we can stretch it out to two weeks.

I'm sorry, but 10 minutes on a saturday morning does nothing for me.

~~~
AdamTReineke
My router at home blocks Reddit and HN except from 5-7pm and 11:45-midnight
(and all day Saturday). Worked amazingly well to cut back the addiction. Now
if I could just get HTTPS blocking to work on FB and Twitter.

~~~
joshmlewis
I do the same. It works pretty well, it's crazy when you start catching
yourself trying to go to one of them by habit.

~~~
AdamTReineke
I don't know why but I find myself opening new tabs without thinking about it.
On Facebook? Ctrl+T, fa, down arrow, enter. Why? Who knows, I was already
there... That's when I noticed that I have some major problems.

------
lowglow
2,000 startups will be launched on Monday morning as a result of this
downtime.

~~~
pyre
... broken window fallacy ?

~~~
kgermino
Not sure what you mean by that but I think it'll be closer to: >"HN's Down!"
>"fuck it, lets get some work done"

~~~
pyre
I misread it as, "2000 startups are created to replace functionality." :P

------
e1ven
For all the flak HN gets about fnid problems, etc, it's still awe-inspiring to
me that such a popular site runs on a single server, with so little admintime
;)

~~~
brador
Just how popular is HN?

Anyone got info on uniques or pageviews a month?

~~~
pg
We currently get just over 200k uniques and just under 2m page views on
weekdays (less on weekends).

~~~
pitchups
Does a single server support this level of traffic? That is pretty impressive
- it would be great to learn about the server's hardware and software
configuration.

~~~
rtm
Old server: two Xeon E5450 chips, 3.0 GHz, 8 cores total, 24 GB RAM.

New server: one Xeon E5-2690 chip, 2.9 GHz, 8 cores total, 32 GB RAM.

~~~
rdl
Wow, nice, that was exactly the HW I was predicting; the fastest single-core-
performance xeon under turboboost.

------
byoung2
Just out of curiosity, what are the specs of the old vs the new server?

------
WALoeIII
Can you please post a picture of the server so we can see all the sweet LEDs
on network cards?

~~~
pg
<http://imgur.com/VuSH2j5>

~~~
JoshTriplett
And the shiny new server replacing it:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Ibm_pc_51...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Ibm_pc_5150.jpg)

~~~
Macsenour
My guess was this:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Com...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Commodore_2001_Series-
IMG_0448b.jpg/280px-Commodore_2001_Series-IMG_0448b.jpg)

~~~
d4vlx
What about <http://imgur.com/BOaFPtn>

So compact yet so powerful.

------
larrys
In case anyone wondering colo place appears to be The Planet.

whois -h whois.arin.net 174.132.225.106

NetRange: 174.132.0.0 - 174.133.255.255 CIDR: 174.132.0.0/15

Name: 6a.e1.84ae.static.theplanet.com

Address: 174.132.225.106

OriginAS: AS36420, AS30315, AS13749, AS21844

NetName: NETBLK-THEPLANET-BLK-15

NetHandle: NET-174-132-0-0-1

Parent: NET-174-0-0-0-0

NetType: Direct Allocation

RegDate: 2008-06-17

Updated: 2012-02-24

Ref: <http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-174-132-0-0-1>

~~~
eclipticplane
*SoftLayer. ThePlanet is no longer, but a lot of their reverse DNS entries still point to .theplanet.com.

~~~
larrys
I had forgotten that but that was actually a merger:

[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/11/10/softl...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/11/10/softlayer-
the-planet-complete-merger/)

In any case they never got the block changed at arin. We switched providers at
one point within the last 6 mos. and the old colo already changed the arin
block.

------
blantonl
Does all of HN run on one _single_ server?

~~~
shiftpgdn
I think a lot of people underestimate how powerful a single well configured
server can be. You don't need Heroku/AWS for everything.

~~~
nostrademons
Also, people underestimate the power of serving out of RAM. It's not
unreasonable to serve 20-30K QPS off a single server if the work it needs to
do is limited to minimal request parsing and fetching some data from main
memory. That's about 2.5 _billion_ requests/day, fully loaded. Granted, I'm
thinking something more like memcached than a fully-formed webserver, but an
in-memory webserver that stores its data in hashtables (like news.yc) and has
a really fast templating languages, or just writes output directly to the
socket, could probably come close.

~~~
self
I use redis for this exact reason -- I prerender over 2,000 page templates
twice a day, and store them in RAM. The app server has to do a little
processing before sending the pages to users -- it picks a different template
depending on whether the user's logged in or not, and then substitutes the
user's info into the template (for logout/profile links). The session info is
also stored in redis. This lets me reboot the server and be ready to serve
pages again almost as soon as it's back up. With all the data, redis uses
about 300-400MB RAM on a 64bit Debian VM.

I use a VPS for my site, and on a VPS, the only thing you're allocated that
you can depend on always being available is RAM. The processor cores might be
shared with a busy user, and you can't always depend on high disk I/O speeds.

------
bitops
It would be cool to see some performance "brag numbers" posted after the
cutover!

------
rdl
Given that you've got performance issues and a fairly limiting deployment
model, I never understood why you didn't get the most absurdly overpowered
machine possible. (I assume you're not, because if you were, you'd be
upgrading every ~6mo or so as faster single-core machines come out)

~~~
jrajav
Would the CPU really be the bottleneck for HN?

~~~
rdl
I assume it's CPU and cache/memory bandwidth.

If I were specing a machine for HN, naively, it would be a competition between
a Xeon "enterprise" CPU with huge cache and memory bandwidth (interleaved up)
and a gaming/desktop CPU with maxed-out single-core performance. Xeons can do
single-core turboboost now, so E5-2690 which goes up to 3.8GHz is probably the
best bet, but a desktop i7-3970X 4.0GHz might be an option if you don't need
ECC (which also gets you slight speed improvement on memory).

------
joezhou
What are we supposed to do on Saturday morning?

~~~
wmf
Let's be honest here... 6 AM? It's a good time to be asleep.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
That's 11am in the UK, noon in Western Europe, 4:30pm in India, and 8pm in
Japan.

Also, it'll be 3am on the West Coast, so some people will still be enjoying
their Friday night.

<http://everytimezone.com/#2013-2-16,-60,6be>

------
lifeisstillgood
This is just idle speculation but are there any stats on HN traffic? I have
always wondered just how many folks read it, how often etc? I heard a million
accounts being bandied around at one point and I cannot tell if that is
excessive or not?

~~~
dylangs1030
It was said up in the comments.

120k unique IPs per day. 1.3 million page views.

source: <http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html>

~~~
jakub_g
Newest data straight from pg in this thread: 200k / 2M.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230201>

------
thekevinjones
Well, it looks like I'll be getting 10 minutes of work done I didn't plan on
doing.

------
evolve2k
Oh maybe on the maintenance landing page you could post up a big bunch of
static links to say the top 50 most voted articles ever! (Or such like).
Something like that would keep us busy for a while.

------
d0m
I have a bad habit of checking hackers news to know when my wifi is up or
down.. I'm more productive when wifi is down because I'm not tempted to read
articles. Saturday will be productivity day!

~~~
3327
profile, procrast settings use them! they are amazing!

~~~
d0m
I usually just block it in my hosts file, but that's a good idea! I'll try it

------
kalmar
Will the beefier machine mean the lifetime of the fnids can be increased?

(Funny surprise: the one for this comment box expired before I submitted this
comment.)

------
goldfeld
For a moment there I read "will be shut down". Phew.

------
joeblau
I guess tonight would be the wrong time to post my Show HN project that I've
been working on then.

------
bcl
Geez, could we stop posting these 'site X is down!' threads? Its gotten so bad
that they're being posted preemptively. ;)

------
GeorgeTirebiter
Hi. Could someone please explain to me why it is necessary for a service (e.g.
HN) to go down while people play with the (increasingly amorphous and
abstract) back end? Is it 1990?

Sorry, just hit a nerve. Like doing some OS updates (Windows) and then needing
to reboot to "complete the installation". I'm sorry. That totally sucks.

~~~
oijaf888
Because the single server that runs it is being turned off and another one is
being turned on? Its probably not worth the time to write something to sync
processor state from one to the other or clone some sort of vmotion type
thing.

------
rikacomet
10 minutes!? 10 minutes!?

oh gosh its okay, I'm just kidding :P

------
nonamegiven
Where will we ask "Is HN down?"

------
rikacomet
you know this will tickle funny bones more than calm panicked ones right?

------
anu_gupta
Wheee - currently much faster, although the true test will be on Monday,
around 5pm GMT.

------
tomasien
It's Friday night. My favorite band (<http://www.theanatomyoffrank.com/music>)
is playing a house show in my town, which is the best kind of show because
it's BYOB. Then, my best friend from Texas is in town for the night, and we're
meeting up. I'm definitely going to go tear it up and create some memories.

And yet..... all I can think of is to stay up all night creating a
"replacement HN" just for Saturday morning. I just started using Django and it
would be perfect for this. Must. Resist. Must. Live. Real. Life.

