Ask PG: Database, flat files or other for YC News?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99092

by iamelgringo • 19 years ago

24 13 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I know that you wrote that you used flat files for Viaweb. I was wondering if you were still doing that for YC News, if you had broken down and started using a database or rolled your own data store with Arc.

Zak• 19 years ago

This has been covered before. IIRC, it's all in memory. The data structures are saved to disk as s-expressions and read on application startup.

pg2• 19 years ago

Right. Except now to make restarts faster I use lazy loading.

petermichaux• 19 years ago

Please write about how you do this and how you interact with the files (loading and serializing). I'm looking at alternatives to using relational databases and information about how to avoid data corruption (features analogous to transactions) is scare. How would you convince a mission critical site developer that this is safe?

lojic• 18 years ago

Would you mind elaborating on the persistence a little? What is the granularity of persistence? For example, does each submission get written to its own file with associated comments? Do you utilize a memory mapped file? Inquiring minds want to know :)

vdm• 19 years ago

>This has been covered before.

Link?

Ask PG: Database, flat files or other for YC News?

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