HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229364

by pg • 13 years ago

225 118 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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...

byoung2• 13 years ago

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

bitops• 13 years ago

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

WALoeIII• 13 years ago

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

pg2• 13 years ago

http://imgur.com/VuSH2j5

Thun• 13 years ago

Haha, epic response.

JoshTriplett• 13 years ago

And the shiny new server replacing it: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Ibm_pc_51...

ericHosick• 13 years ago

I call foul. This doesn't even look like it's powered up.

Edit: Wow. 3.5 years on HN and my first down-voted post. I guess I should have added a sarcasm tag or stick with keeping comments "safe".

melvinmt• 13 years ago

// 3 hours ago · 1,439 views

Impressive.

rayvega• 13 years ago

Love the symmetry of the photo...triangle. (I suspect with the orange background that it was taken at the YC office? http://m.inc.com/?incid=96)

cubix• 13 years ago

I would have thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LISP_machine.jpg

MaysonL• 13 years ago

Not one of these?

http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-bendix-g15.jpg

[one of the first computer models I ever wrote for - a three address machine: first a source operand, second destination, third address of next instruction. The memory was a rotating drum]

e1ven• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

Just how popular is HN?

Anyone got info on uniques or pageviews a month?

GuiA2• 13 years ago

As of October 5th 2011:

"Also, a traffic update: HN now gets over 120k unique ips on a weekday, and serves over 1.3 million page views."

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

Additionally:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com

pg2• 13 years ago

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

blantonl• 13 years ago

Does all of HN run on one single server?

abstractbill3• 13 years ago

Not just a single server, a single process on a single core (last time I asked pg at least).

iamwil• 13 years ago

And I recall the last time I looked at the source (when it was released with Arc), it didn't use a database either. All the data is stored as files.

shiftpgdn• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

mbell• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that a single modern physical server that is decently configured (12-16 cores, 128GB of ram) is the processing equivalent of about 16 EC2 m1.large instances.

lowglow• 13 years ago

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

pyre2• 13 years ago

... broken window fallacy ?

kgermino• 13 years ago

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"

tomasien• 13 years ago

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.

larrys2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

larrys2• 13 years ago

I had forgotten that but that was actually a merger:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/11/10/softl...

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.

joezhou• 13 years ago

What are we supposed to do on Saturday morning?

wmf• 13 years ago

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

Samuel_Michon• 13 years ago

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

weslly• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_morning_cartoon

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

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?

dylangs10302• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

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

goldfeld• 13 years ago

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

joeblau• 13 years ago

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

robbiep2• 13 years ago

Do you think you could go down for a week?

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

ghshephard2• 13 years ago

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.

AdamTReineke2• 13 years ago

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.

JoachimSchipper• 13 years ago

You can lock yourself out easily with noprocrast and minaway set to a week or two (say 60 x 24 x 10). At least one prominent HN'er claims to have done this when needing a break.

Happy to have been of assistance; please send the $250 to GiveWell. ;-)

e-dard• 13 years ago

Without meaning to sound snarky or anything, isn’t there something else at work if you have to externally block sites to stop you procrastinating?

I would have thought getting to the root cause of your “HN addiction” would probably be a better alternative.

bsilvereagle• 13 years ago

Editing hosts files works wonders.

technotony• 13 years ago

I recommend using StayFocusd: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...

It lets you limit the number of minutes you can read sites (and importantly links from thoses sites). I give myself 10 minutes per day until 9pm at night.

robbiep2• 13 years ago

I actually use stayfocused, but always have my phone and tablet which don't work with plugins!

jey• 13 years ago

If even rtm, tenured professor of computer science at MIT, can't escape from sysadmin duty, I really have no hope.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

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

-- Paul Tomko

evolve2k• 13 years ago

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.

rdl3• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

Would the CPU really be the bottleneck for HN?

rdl3• 13 years ago

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).

rikacomet2• 13 years ago

10 minutes!? 10 minutes!?

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

rikacomet2• 13 years ago

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

nonamegiven4• 13 years ago

Where will we ask "Is HN down?"

d0m2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

profile, procrast settings use them! they are amazing!

d0m2• 13 years ago

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

bcl• 13 years ago

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

thekevinjones• 13 years ago

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

kalmar• 13 years ago

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.)

GeorgeTirebiter• 13 years ago

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.

tomschlick• 13 years ago

If you're using a mac http://selfcontrolapp.com/ works pretty well.

tomjen34• 13 years ago

HNs backend isn't very abstract. The site doesn't really use Javascript and resides on a single server.

And I agree with you on the windows issue -- except that ten plus years ago I did in fact reboot and/or shut down my computer.

oijaf888• 13 years ago

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.

anu_gupta• 13 years ago

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

HN will be down Saturday morning while we switch servers

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