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Comment by dx034 | Hacker News Reader

Just putting this on a vps or cheap dedicated server with 16gb ram would've led to sub-ms response times at much lower costs (if you don't get Azure and Cloudflare for free like him). At those response speeds, scalability is also not really an issue if you cache aggressively at the edge.

Argos is then nice to have but not really necessary. If the server responds back <1ms, those 30% saved RTT are probably not detectable for the user.

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I'm not sure that you quite realize that Troy's intention here is to eventually be soaking a whole lot of zeroes with this. Add on to that that, if people are relying on this as a service, it had better not go down under any remotely plausible circumstances, and some growth-hacker's dedicated server from Hetzner or whatever is unsuitable. Edge caching only blunts sufficiently this if everybody's searching for the same passwords and proving that that's the case is a burden you have not shouldered.

To that end, "just use a VPS or a cheap dedicated server" sounds a whole lot like the middlebrow thing we're supposed to not be fans of around here.

> Troy's intention here is to eventually be soaking a whole lot of zeroes this this

huh?

Sorry, shorthand common in my neck of the woods. Used for any Thing per Your Favorite Time Unit, measured logarithmically. In this case, requests-per-second.

(Edit: ah, typo. s/this this/with this. Clearer?)

@pbhjpbhj - I believe the meaning of the sentence is that Troy Hunt is expecting/planning for a few orders of magnitude of growth.

"Soak a few zeros" for example going from 1,000 calls per second to 1,000,000 calls per second.

what an odd way to say that.

"Soak" is often used for "take" in engineering circles. "Zeroes" is often used for orders of magnitude in engineering circles. I've never before heard these put together in that fashion, however.

Sorry, I still don't understand it.

Could you write out deelowe's quoted sentence, above, as clearly as you're able?

> I'm not sure that you quite realize that Troy's intention here is to eventually be soaking a whole lot of zeroes with this.

Troy's goal is to get this used by a lot of people with a large number of requests per second (so, a number with a lot of zeros in it)

def not clearer. I know we are all supposed to be smart here, but maybe use more common words and language. People come from a lot of different backgrounds here.

On the other hand, I'm happy to learn a new fun term. Language is boring without aphorisms.

Learning 'soak a few zeros' is more valuable to me than the whole rest of this thread. I doubt I'll ever use it, but I like it.

> Edge caching only blunts sufficiently this if everybody's searching for the same passwords

AFAIK caching already kicks in when people check different passwords that have same first five characters in their hash.

Sorry, you're right, I should have been clearer. The bigger concern is that caching doesn't replace fault tolerance and rolling your own disaster recovery. I didn't mean to suggest that caching was not being done or would not be helpful. A million keys would be pretty uniformly dispersed; intuitively it seems like you'd need to have a lot more traffic than he's currently got to the point where caching reliably soaks enough load off of "a VPS or cheap dedicated server" that you can afford to have the server blow up--because servers blow up.

"A VPS or cheap dedicated server" is YOLO stuff. Not something you do when you want other people to rely on you.

You can set up 3 VPS and use Cloudflare's load balancing or a solution by someone like DigitalOcean? That'll still be cheaper than using Lambdas and block storage.

If you use Cloudflare, they should still handle attacks and caching. For the origin server, I can't imagine any scenario where you'd get a lot of growth from the immediate attention. How are more than a few thousand requests per second realistic? It's not as if the whole world would suddenly constantly check passwords. And if you use his API for 3rd party services it'd make more sense to open source it so that others can use a local copy.

> To that end, "just use a VPS or a cheap dedicated server" sounds a whole lot like the middlebrow thing we're supposed to not be fans of around here.

I know that we're supposed to all be fans of AWS and everything as a service. But in reality I found simple VPS (can be Hetzner, OVH, AWS, Google, whatever) to be faster, cheaper and less prone to downtime (as most downtime comes from software rather than hardware anyway).

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