15 years, one server, 8GB RAM and 500k users – how Webminal refuses to die

https://community.webminal.org/t/15-years-one-server-8gb-ram-and-500k-users-how-webminal-refuses-to-die/8803

by giis • 4 months ago

304 53 4 months ago

community.webminal.org

sudo_cowsay3• 4 months ago

I've never tried Webminal (only used Linode for it's simplicity). But, it seems great. I'll probably try it out.

giis10• 4 months ago

Sure thanks, Let me know if you have feedback.

sudo_cowsay3• 4 months ago

I really like the ease of use of the site. It's also very clean. However, when you go into the Linux, there is a bit of latency (very noticeable). I know that it's impossible to remove the latency completely (it is what it is), but is there a way to slightly reduce it?

sudo_cowsay3• 4 months ago

How does it only work on 8gb of RAM if it serves 500k users (albeit not all 500k at once)?

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 4 months ago

Well that server is worth 1M due to the 8GB RAM now!

user342832• 4 months ago

I wonder how much money went into the hosting over the years.

A year ago I bought a Intel N100 Mini PC with 16 GB DDR5 RAM and a 512 GB SSD for $170.

Maybe it could have hosted the site too. It's certainly a lot faster than Azure VMs with 4 "vCPUs".

PunchyHamster• 4 months ago

2x the cost of power is probably reasonable number to use

harias• 4 months ago

It's been a while since I've used it but Google cloud shell is a good free platform for learning Linux commands as well

https://shell.cloud.google.com

tuananh• 4 months ago

iximuiz also give you 1 hour per day free i think.

very easy to use. almost instant.

ramon156• 4 months ago

blegh, the content is interesting but i've grown numb towards AI speak. It's so generic that I lose interest halfway through.

andai3• 4 months ago

Yeah, the content itself is amazing but the AI writing detracts from that. I'd much rather read broken English than GPT output.

That being said I really enjoyed reading this, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

actionfromafar• 4 months ago

User mode linux is so cool.

giis10• 4 months ago

Yes, User mode linux pretty cool project. If I'm not wrong, UML is kind of predecessor to gvisor or firecracker from a different era.

arjie• 4 months ago

That's wonderful and I know why it's an Indian founder. Was so hard to get a remote shell back then. Indian debit cards didn't work online reliably and so on. So what's the hardware underneath? Cloud server or on-prem?

These days the world is amazing. Oracle Cloud gives you a ton for free. But perhaps there's some niche where this is useful. I have to say that this shared screen comms system is outrageously crazy, hahaha.

giis10• 4 months ago

It began as on-prem, Freston hosted in his house (we shared server cost, some people called it crazy, because I sent money to someone I met in Linuxforums.org and never seen this person, even via internet, I trusted him because I know him for few years on that forum) After 3 years or so we moved on to cloud servers. Mostly switching from one infra and another if we get some credits :D Couple of years we had Linode sponsoring those nodes until its acquisition.

shared screen comms system is outrageously crazy,

Thats Freston idea. I remember our typically chat begins with something like "Hey Laks, Can you see me typing!" ;)

xantronix• 4 months ago

Constraints are beautiful.

andai3• 4 months ago

This is so fascinating, I've never heard of UML!

How many users can this support simultaneously? It says 256MB RAM per user, 8GB total on server? But it's probably more than 32 simultaneous users?

giis10• 4 months ago

In past I have seen around 10 process, but I think with current setup, it could support around upto 20 UML. Remember this runs on the same server where others login and get their normal bash account too. So not a dedicated UML server.

andai3• 4 months ago

Thanks. Interesting, that's slightly less than I expected with 500,000 users!

caijia• 4 months ago

UML is a smart call, and reminds me when I built an inventory and shift scheduling system on wordpress in 2017.

somtimes the "wrong" / "old" tool for some job is exactly right for you if you really understand it. UML is old but fits here.

15 years is long enough to call memory about a lot of things.

internet_points• 4 months ago

All that on a single Github Sponsor[0].

[0] https://github.com/sponsors/Lakshmipathi

giis10• 4 months ago

Actually I opened up GitHub Sponsor just few weeks ago. Few tims i received enquiry from users (professors) who wanted to contribute back.only now i have proper channel to redirect such requests.

gchamonlive• 4 months ago

Would UML be similar to Incus running unprivileged VMs?

mikkupikku• 4 months ago

To be fair. 8GB of ram is huge. I don't know, maybe I'm stuck in the early 00s but even 2 GB of ram still seems extravagant; I remember when that was an exotic amount of RAM for dedicated gamers to play extremely high fidelity games, so for a mere web server 8 GB of ram almost seems like absurd overkill. I still feel a tinge of shame whenever I see any software of my own using more than a few hundred megabytes. What a waste.

aduty• 4 months ago

I remember when 16 MB was considered a lot. Then again, I also remember when graphics acceleration was considered optional.

Koshkin2• 4 months ago

Well, graphics acceleration is still considered optional on servers :)

fsagx• 4 months ago

I asked my dad for the 16kB expansion. He said no.

giis10• 4 months ago

Until few days server ago was using 8GB and I did a cost cutting measure and its running on 4GB server for last week or so. :)

seethishat• 4 months ago

The major difference, here, is this is intended for multiple users (not one person). Imaging 5,000 users all using the device at the same time. The amount of memory, open file handles, network connections, etc. for many users at once adds up.

dhosek• 4 months ago

The IBM mainframe that I used at UIC in the 80s had 64 MEGA bytes of RAM and about double the users.

andrewstuart• 4 months ago

64K was huge when the Commodore 64 came along.

Lio2• 4 months ago

Not sure why the down votes, this is true. If you only had 16, 32, or 48K then 64K seemed like a lot.

Hell, the RAM size was so important that they named machines after it.

Twirrim• 4 months ago

I barely used or remember the ZX-81 my folks had with it's amazing 1KB of memory. It had a 16K expansion module you could plug into the back, which apparently made a big difference, but also didn't have the greatest connection. You could easily dislodge it typing on the keyboard. I do remember my father coming up with various ways to try to secure it.

The ZX Spectrum that followed, with its huge 48K of RAM was night and day. The programs were so much more complicated.

Even echo on linux these days takes 38K of disk space and a baseline of 13K of memory to execute, before whatever is required to hold the message you're repeating.

nkrisc• 4 months ago

Depends entirely on what you're doing. 8GB of RAM is very insufficient for 3D texturing workflows, for example, where you can have many different 4k textures cached in memory. For other things, 8GB is probably a lot.

weird-eye-issue• 4 months ago

Recently I had a laggy browser tab and I checked and it literally was using 7.6 GB of RAM.

Koshkin2• 4 months ago

Quite often clients were more powerful than servers. Hell, at one point a CPU embedded into a printer could be faster than, say, 8088. An X server (running on the client side) often required a more powerful machine than one running X clients (i.e. a server). A web browser is not an exception.

BLKNSLVR• 4 months ago

Old school internet. Internet done right.

Great work giis.

I haven't used it, I didn't know it existed until now, but I'm happy it exists and has been providing service to those who need it. There should be more of this.

giis10• 4 months ago

Thanks, most of these came out restriction, we cant afford to throw money on horizontal scaling (adding more server,load server etc). So we kind of forced to try out new things to keep cost affordable. There are many thing left out on above doc: IIRC, we started with openvz and even today our security relies on SELinux, how we remapped user account creation with pre-existing templates for ext4 quota, we moved to xfs because of flexibility. Mysqldb quota/limits, fork bombs by college/school students bringing out docker environment. Old school internet is right term.

gk--• 4 months ago

restrictions lead to clever and optimized solutions. well done!

adamm255• 4 months ago

The way the stack is described reminded me of this masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE9W9Ghe4Jk

lvl155• 4 months ago

You just might break that 10K visit from Spanish tech blog in 2017.

ggandhi• 4 months ago

This is a very inspiring entrepreneurial story. The story of not giving up.

znpy• 4 months ago

User Mode Linux

Oh man, what a blast from the past. I have fond memories of learning linux networking with netkit (based on UML).

UML was a really really cool piece of technology.

If anybody is wondering, User Mode Linux lets you boot a Linux kernel as a normal linux process, and then run an userspace, still in a linux process. This is from 2001. Super cool.

ErroneousBosh• 4 months ago

I was trying to remember what this was called the other day, for some reason.

It turns out that if you run a uml kernel and point its root at the root of the disk the host Linux is running on, there's a hell of a turf war between the two and no-one wins.

riverforest• 4 months ago

This is the post that should be required reading before anyone spins up a Kubernetes cluster for their side project.

BirAdam• 4 months ago

Well... The best days were just putting hardware in a 2U box, racking it, and paying a bit for power and networking. This was such an easier time, and a handful of core 2 duos were fully capable of streaming 1080p video to around a million daus.

Of course, there's far more money in really fancy shared hosting that wastes resources, so that's the current model. Then you market to C-level folks that "real companies" host on AWS or Azure, and that all others options are "unserious." If your opex for compute isn't a million, you're wrong.

essnine• 4 months ago

It takes a lot of guts to run something like this for years on end, kudos to you for setting this up and running it for all these years. I am wondering if you'd ever come across pubnixes or tilde servers when you first started up webminal?

mig39• 4 months ago

I didn't know about Webminal until today. Going to try it with some college students this afternoon!

giis10• 4 months ago

Sure. We had quite a lot of universities and schools used this platform for their classes. I'll be away from system for next 48hrs though.Drop us a mail,will respond.

15 years, one server, 8GB RAM and 500k users – how Webminal refuses to die

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