zlacker

>>pg+(OP)
Does all of HN run on one single server?

>>blanto+y2
Not just a single server, a single process on a single core (last time I asked pg at least).

>>abstra+Y2
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.

>>iamwil+y4
Files???? That's a joke right???

>>spoile+S5
Why should it be? You can get a long long way by treating the filesystem as a database. The first engineers at Amazon used the same technique a lot, as do I.

>>abstra+16
Because you always end up building your own database out of flat files and that is always worse than using an existing one.

>>kansfa+S6
And yet, here you are, on a site run off a flat file database.

>>saraid+t7
A commenting site that:

- Has average latency over 500ms when not under load - Performs quite poorly under load (I hate to bring it up, but the most recent example was Aaron Swartz's passing. Anyone who used HN then to get news knows how poorly HN performs under load) - Is restarted every week or two because it leaks memory - Keeps XSRF tokens in memory and loses them across restarts - Doesn't have a full markup language

HN is quite poorly-featured compared to typical commenting sites. People use HN because pg is here. He could remove half the features on the site (bold & italics... what features are there even to remove beside nested commenting?) and retain 90% of the audience.

>>badgar+Pd
Well, I guess we can agree to disagree. HN is is popular for me because of the participants. pg, as epic and central as he is to ycombinator, doesn't play that much of a role on HN in terms of moderating and directing conversations, or even, in recent years, participating that much.

With regards to the commenting site itself, I can think of no more viscerally enjoyable a forum I've ever participated in, with the possible exception of *Forum on MTS. There is nothing whatsoever that I would change about it, with the one possible exception of tweaking the markup so you could add fixed-width text/lists that wrapped over multiple lines. It's the only additional feature I've ever wanted out of HN. There is beauty in it's simplicity. [Edit: Okay, I would also move the upvote/downvote arrows a bit for mobile usage. It's almost impossible to hit the right one without a lot of zooming]

And, with rare exception of a MSM hit, the performance is more than adequate for an environ that should be encouraging reading, digesting, and composing.