<story><title>HN ran on a single box in 2018 has anything changed?</title><url>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>axegon_</author><text>There is something comical about this: HN receives an absurd amount of traffic. More than startups and corporations with millions of customers and millions if not billions of dollars behind them, and yet it runs on effectively an arduino nano compared to what they are using.  HN serves all the contents significantly faster than any of them at the fraction of the time and cost. Let&amp;#x27;s take my old job for instance: the company website had almost nothing on it: a list of products, a jobs page and that&amp;#x27;s it. That website ran on 12(yes, twelve) dell servers, each having a 4 socket motherboard, each occupied by a 12 core xeon, and each of those servers had 384 gigs of ram. Sure, it tracked every click and whatnot but the data that was tracked was never actually used and the all-beloved bundle.min.js was 15 megabytes. So much for low carbon footprint and all that...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bin_bash</author><text>&amp;gt; absurd amount of traffic&lt;p&gt;Not sure what platforms you&amp;#x27;ve worked on but &amp;quot;6M requests&amp;#x2F;day&amp;quot; is peanuts in my neighborhood. (No offense to dang and team which do a fantastic job, but that&amp;#x27;s not high throughput compared to almost any platform I&amp;#x27;ve worked on over the past decade.)</text></comment>
<story><title>HN ran on a single box in 2018 has anything changed?</title><url>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>axegon_</author><text>There is something comical about this: HN receives an absurd amount of traffic. More than startups and corporations with millions of customers and millions if not billions of dollars behind them, and yet it runs on effectively an arduino nano compared to what they are using.  HN serves all the contents significantly faster than any of them at the fraction of the time and cost. Let&amp;#x27;s take my old job for instance: the company website had almost nothing on it: a list of products, a jobs page and that&amp;#x27;s it. That website ran on 12(yes, twelve) dell servers, each having a 4 socket motherboard, each occupied by a 12 core xeon, and each of those servers had 384 gigs of ram. Sure, it tracked every click and whatnot but the data that was tracked was never actually used and the all-beloved bundle.min.js was 15 megabytes. So much for low carbon footprint and all that...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mschuster91</author><text>On the other side, it is not much content to begin with.&lt;p&gt;Traffic is a bit of text, &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; basic CSS, no images, no tracking, no bullshit means that load times are probably instantaneous even on a 56k modem.&lt;p&gt;Content is a bit of plain text =&amp;gt; easy rendering, the entire database probably would fit into memory, so not much in terms of i&amp;#x2F;o going on.</text></comment>