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Comment by dizhn | Hacker News Reader

I belive hackernews itself is a couple of servers too.

I think HN's stack is the right choice for them and that it fulfills its purpose excellently, but I do seem to recall both of their hard drives failing more or less simultaneously & HN going down for about 8 hours not that long ago.

If that happened at the SaaS company I worked at previously, it would be a bloodbath. The churn would be huge. And our customer's customers would be churning from them. If that happened at a particularly inopportune time, like while we'd been raising money or something, it could potentially endanger the company.

(I'd like to stress again this is not a criticism of HN/dang, but just to illustrate a set of requirements where huge AWS spends do make sense.)

One big server with a flat text file DB on NVME drives AFAIK.

I believe the application code is single threaded due to its interpreter too.

it does run pretty slow under load though, and they have acknowledged it's due to this

HN has mutable data though. That's a much harder problem than indexing a large amount of static data like a search engine.

Not only that, but I don't think the custom datastore handles concurrent writes.

One thread FTW. :)

I read once Reddit is just one big sql database

Reddit was using Cassandra in 2010 (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bcqhi/reddits_...). The experience was mentioned on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694461. I expect that they started with an RDBMS and made various moves over the years.

Wikipedia too.

That doesn't sound right: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_at_WMF

dang? Bueller? Anyone?

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