Tell HN: HN Moved from M5 to AWS

>>dang+Sb
How will you switch back to the new server once it's ready without losing database records?

>>herpde+mv
Based on the “great rebuild” [0] (was it about a decade ago?), my understanding is that the database is text files in the file system hierarchy arranged rather like a btree.

Comment threads and comments each have a unique item number assigned monotonically.

The file system has a directory structure something like:

  |—1000000
  | |-100000
  | |-200000
  | |-…
  | |-900000
  |—2000000
  | |-100000
  | |-200000
  | |-…
  | |-900000
  |-…

I imagine that the comment threads (like this one) while text are actually arc code (or a dialect of it) that is parsed into a continuation for each user to handle things like showdead, collapsed threads and hell bans.

To go further out on a wobbly limb of out of my ass speculation, I suspect all the database credentialing is vanilla Unix user and group permissions because that is the simplest thing that might work and is at least as robust as any in-database credentialing system running on Unix would be.

Though simple direct file system IO is about as robust as reads and writes get since there’s no transaction semantics above the hardware layer, it is also worth considering that lost HN comments and stale reads don’t have a significant business impac

I mean HN being down didn’t result in millions of dollars per hour in lost revenue for YC…if it stayed offline for a month, there might be a significant impact to “goodwill” however.

Anyway, just WAGing.

[0] before the great rebuild I think all the files were just in one big directory and one day there were suddenly an impractical quantity and site performance fell over a cliff.

zlacker