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I'm guessing that you could get by with some pretty simple caching. Judging by the timestamps of the new comments, there don't seem to be more than say 2 comments per minute. I'm guessing that there are even fewer new posts and probably more upvotes. But I still feel like you could get by with very little in terms of HW.

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Fair enough. I suppose the entire HN corpus would probably not be that large compared to modern HW capabilities.

Still seems to be a bit fragile, though. I am assuming persistence is a periodic thing, making the system vulnerable to eg. power failure between persist events, ie writing the text files. To be balanced against the simplicity gains of only having to deal with in-program data structures, though, I guess.

Then again it's worked flawlessly for 5+ years so what do I know!

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