This blog runs on my Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

This blog runs on my Raspberry Pi

blog.kumarutsavanand.com

21 pointsalexellisuk30 comments

But does it tho?

  $ curl https://blog.kumarutsavanand.com/expose-local-endpoints-with-inlets-and-google-compute-engine/ > /dev/null
    % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                   Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
    100 22369  100 22369    0     0    154      0  0:02:25  0:02:25 --:--:--  5699

It would be great if the author of this post could respond here with how many requests per second it took to bring down the site... I assume using a RPi is still a viable solution for 99% of the time

I wonder if he was running a database driven site off of his Pi? It wouldn't take many queries per second to kill off something running on a SD card. A static site would probably be able to saturate the Ethernet before the Pi gave up. Even old Pentiums could saturate Fast Ethernet, although the Pi is penalized because the Ethernet runs off of USB so its extra processor intensive.

Edit: is blog is back up. It apparently run on Node, and most of the article is about how you break through multiple layers of NAT via a Google service. Very useful if you are hosting your blog off of your cell service or something, although someone with a regular router on a regular ISP can just port forward and set up dynamic DNS to avoid the headache of a Google service that will be discontinued in a year or two.

I don’t disagree, but I think the PRi 4 no longer suffers from the USB-Ethernet bottleneck (never pushed my 3 and 4 hard enough to notice, to be honest).

Even if it isn't the bottleneck, running the Ethernet over USB means the CPU has to get involved to do all of the Bus Mastering, which cuts into cycles it could be spending on preparing the packets.

Slashdotted in record time.

Somewhere a Raspberry Pi just went nova.

Can't wait for the postmortem follow up.

This blog ran on my Raspberry Pi

Annnnnd, it's gone.

Early on (around 2006) xkcd.com was hosted on our former family computer which my brother left running in his bedroom while he was away at college. One day I was playing Counter-Strike when suddenly my connection got interrupted and wouldn't come back. The cause was https://xkcd.com/10/ being linked to on either Boing Boing or Slashdot (I can't remember the exact details). If I'm remembering this right, the computer it was running on was an old HP desktop, probably purchased around 1998-2000.

It’s Randall Munroe. :o

Nah, I'm his brother.

Yeah – I meant “[the brother] is Randall Munroe”.

Hey you’re related to royalty.

A blog can usually be static and therefore run behind a CDN. Whenever I read "look at my blog", I expect it to be HNpwned.

The postmortem followups are quite interesting though if there is a good analysis behind.

> So the only time my blog will be down is when I'm out of power or if my Internet is down!

This didn't turn out to be true.

Should have added an extra node...

RIP RPi

What is the purpose of this exercise, when you can host static blog for free on GitHub?

Also, was this updated later, or was it always using GCP?

Andddddd, already hugged to death.

She Gon'

Seems like the better approach would be to host the blog on the GCE f1-micro instance instead of using it solely as a proxy / exit node.

Or use a CDN and host it without Google Cloud.

How does a Pi compared to the lowest end VPS's out there?

Ill use the cheapest AWS lightsail as the benchmark for a low end VPS, which is 3.50 a month. 512mb of RAM, 1v CPU, 20gb of SSD.

Cheapest pi4 is 30$, which gets you 1gb of ram and a quad core ARM v8 at 1.50 ghz. BYO storage, which is not ideal via sd card.

In any business purposes comparison, you can push that VPS much much harder then you can the pi. But who cares? the pi is yours, it's right there, and it's awesome to do real computer stuff on it. Or stupid computer stuff, whatever, it's yours, no-one has to know. So much easier too.

Lowest end VPS I know about is $5/month. Which means it costs more than an RPi after 9 months or so (7 months for the RPi, another month for the SD card, and one more month for sundries). Power usage on a RPi is pretty trivial so that probably won't change the equation much.

Of course you'll also have to pay for your bandwidth with the RPi solution, but you were doing that anyway. The hosting will have more bandwidth and processing power, but also the possibility of big bills if you get large traffic spikes.

Hope this onslaught of traffic didn't fry the Pi.

One would almost expect the home internet to die before the RPi, especially if it’s an RPi4.

*ran

#dontfrythepi

And now it no longer runs!

ERR_TIMED_OUT oops.

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