zlacker

>>mikece+(OP)
> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year.

> Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year.

> Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.

> Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year.

> Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year.

Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.

>>Duneda+Z
I really wonder why it’s so expensive to run. I always hear things about scaling but I used to run a top 500 alexia website and it was just a php app running on a mutualized offer for $5/month. Lots of manual caching though but still.

My wild guess is that either the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) or they do other costly things at scale (sgx?)

>>baby+G5
> the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java)

how's java relevant here?

>>mi_lk+T8
Java in theory and in synthetic benchmarks: damn near as lean and mean as C.

Every actual Java project: “oh, did you want that memory and those cycles for something else? Yeah, sorry, I need them all. Why no, I’m not actually doing anything right now, why do you ask?”

>>hotnfr+oa
In this case we don’t need to speculate at all. Signal is open source. Back when I was at Twilio we even did some at-scale experiments with running Signal. The intensive parts have absolutely nothing to do with Java because the server logic is relatively simple. The hard parts of Signal are the database storage/retrieval and the encryption.