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Comment by eposner | Hacker News Reader

Taiga.io hit #1 on @HackerNewsYCBot for a while today (thanks HN!). Traffic up 100x. I was dumb enough to ask our developers if we could handle it. This is what they sent back

http://goo.gl/B57ERn

Each little "ball" is a request to the server On the left: the IP numbers from the users connecting around the world To the right: The url's being served up In the center: The "static calls being serviced by our front end

The brightness represents the speed with which the code written by our awesome developers delivers data (aided of course the great hardware)

Had any of the balls gone past to the right, that would have been a serve we couldn't return. Try that, Federer!

View on HN

Nice video, haven't seen Logstalgia in a while! At first I didn't think the traffic looked that heavy but comparing the time and requests, quite decent numbers (~6600 hits in ~2 minutes).

And sweet job on Taiga, nice and clean looks!

Great job, both taiga and managing the peak so well. Any tips about the infraestructure you are running? Relaying on any PaSS or managing yourself?

Virtual machine, 1 core, 1 GB RAM, <20% CPU all the time.

Awesome.

FYI: Link shorteners are frowned upon on HN.

Curious about why. I'd understand a social stigma against ad-based redirection services, but does that translate into a frown against all shorteners somehow? Or is there some other cause?

They obscure the destination, track users, and break at some point in the future leaving a bad link in the archives.

Thanks.

Some of these aren't properties exclusive to redirection sites... but I'll readily admit they're very much standard features there, while mostly not too common elsewhere.

> Had any of the balls gone past to the right, that would have been a serve we couldn't return. Try that, Federer!

I do see a few balls going to the right -- what happened with those?

Those are 404 error... But very few in the context of the whole dataset

That is the most useless visualisation I think I've ever seen.

I love it.

Cool visualization! But the top 50% of that (which seems to be the most dense) could have been completely avoided if you just slapped a CloudFront instance in front of it.

I don't know -- by some guestimates fed into

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

I ended up with an estimated 600USD/month bill ... so what would they gain by complicating their architecture when they're already able to handle the traffic?

Using CloudFlare instead of CloudFront would have meant, what, $20/month?

And what guestimates would those be? I doubt they are serving 10TB in static files per month.

If adding a CDN to your architecture is too much complication then I would definitely not want to use your product for my business. It's literally a question of pointing CloudFront to your server, and substituting the CloudFront assigned domain in for static assets.

Also, from what I can tell, they aren't handling the traffic. I have tried numerous times to use the "Open Live Instance" link and it does not work.

> And what guestimates would those be?

1gb/week with 60% traffic to the US, average 20kb size with 1000 reset requests/month. I'd love to hear some more realistic estimates. And while (server/service) price is far from the most important consideration, it sounds like they manage to stay way under 50 usd/month in hosting currently. So as anything over 30/month would be a considerable (relative) increase. Add to that doubling? the management overhead from, say, an hour a week to two -- and they'd need to see some clear benefits? And what are those?

As for "open live instance, it says "ready soon" for me - but perhaps that is because they didn't, as you say, handle the traffic after all?

You are actually seeing the dedicated IP "custom ssl certificate" charge ($600/month). Check the cost with and without that option. I just used your exact numbers and the monthly cost is $0.73 without that.

Note that doesn't mean you cannot serve your resources over HTTPS. It just means you cannot alias something like "cdn.yoursite.com" to the cloudfront cdn, you will need to use the cloudfront https url.

I did think it came out oddly high -- I also didn't chceck ssl/dedicated ip... I think. Maybe the calculator helpfully updated itself with more "reasonable" settings... ;-)

[edit: yep, was the ssl cert thing. Now I end up with 0.00 USD/Month, which certainly isn't an unbearable expense...]

You only need to pay the $600/month if you need to support clients older than IE7. You can use the SNI option instead which is "free" (relative to the rest of the costs associated with a CFD).

Hi, the link should say (for now) "Almost ready" when you hover. We will have that ready soon (soon = days). We don't have problems with adding a CDN at all. We do that a lot for many other projects. It's just a matter of this "stealth launch of Taiga" going out of control, we didn't need a CDN for a 1 core + 1 GB RAM virtual machine, which is what is actually handling all the traffic. Having said that, expect a CDN in place next week.

Hi, thanks. I didn't mean to indicate you weren't capable of adding a CDN. I was just providing a counter to the "why complicate the architecture" argument.

Thanks for the explanation of the "Almost Ready" message. I do see that, however I took it to mean that an instance was being spun up (as I waited). Might want to change that to "Coming Soon" or similar.

So can we get this code as well?

This is generated using Logstalgia, which is a website access log visualization tool.

https://code.google.com/p/logstalgia/

It also did incredibly well on the Facebook Community Page...

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1562750133...

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