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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

Total overkill, especially given that replicated RAM storage is quite pricey when compared to traditional alternatives. Ideally, you just use Redis to store (cough cache cough) latest forum threads/comments and have everything else on disk (maybe in a RDBMS?). You get performance and price.

EDIT:

>Another of those tricks has to do with the fact that nearly half of our code is also written in LUA running directly on Redis.

Urgh. Ugly.

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Agreed that it's overkill for most use cases (in fact I mention that it's not ideal for most people and we're likely an edge case).

As far as putting a great deal of code into Lua scripts, we'll be putting together a few blog posts explaining how we make this manageable. We were able to double our API throughput by shifting this direction so for us this is worth the difficulty we faced in finding ways to modularize and reuse code in Redis Lua scripts.

What's the edge case with you guys? It is cool to use Redis and come up with exotic architectures for common use cases (is there anything more common than forum threads and comments?). However, there will come a point where it just won't make sense to pay 10x more (in hardware and maintenance) than you need to, to store old, rarely read posts.

Looks like they provide a real time commenting system for sites. With any success that is going to be one heavily hit API.

I guess I just don't see the benefit of a pure Redis approach, compared to the traditional approach of using a proper (replicated or otherwise) disk-based datastore, with caching (Redis or otherwise), especially for a forum/comment framework. It seems needlessly complicated and expensive.

Wait, does that mean that 50% of their code has been implemented twice? Why would they need to do that? Why not just keep the Lua version?

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