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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. If the unban link described there doesn't work for you, please email us and we'll take care of it.

I'm sorry that this is necessary, btw. We hate it when legit users get blocked, but HN is also hit by a ton of crawlers and it's hard to distinguish the two. Since our app server runs on a single core, we don't have a drop of spare performance.

Some big improvements which we've been working on for months will hopefully roll out soonish, which should allow us to loosen things up quite a bit.

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> Since our app server runs on a single core

Wow. Couple of questions :

* where is the server hosted and do you have a db server and maybe a cache server as well? What are the specs of the server?

* how much traffic does HN receive? Daily or monthly hits.

> Some big improvements which we've been working on for months will hopefully roll out soonish

If you're allowed to talk about it, what are the improvements?

We’re recently running two machines (master and standby) at M5 Hosting. All of HN runs on a single box, nothing exotic:

  CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v4 @ 3.50GHz (3500.07-MHz K8-class CPU)
  FreeBSD/SMP: 2 package(s) x 4 core(s) x 2 hardware threads
  Mirrored SSDs for data, mirrored magnetic for logs (UFS)

We get around 4M requests a day.

Just curious--why is HN run on only a single core?

I assume it doesn't handle any multithreading yet.

Arc is implemented in Racket and uses its green threads, which don't do multiprocessing.

The standard Racket threads do run on a single core. Racket (not Arc) does however support two forms of parallelism, namely futures and places.

http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/parallelism.html

I don't know if changes were made on your end or if my VPN host rotated to an unblocked IP address, but everything is working for me now, with or w/o the VPN connected.

If it was something you guys did, awesome, thanks!

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