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Why HN was slow and how Rtm fixed it

(ycombinator.com)
257 points pg | 4 comments | 19 Jan 11 18:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.639s | source
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Luyt ◴[19 Jan 11 19:08 UTC] No.2120836[source]▶
"It turns out there is a hack in FreeBSD, invented by Filo, that causes the O/S not to give a new connection to the server until an entire HTTP request has arrived."

I wouldn't call it a hack, but a feature ;-)

    # Buffer a HTTP request in the kernel 
    # until it's completely read.
    apache22_http_accept_enable="yes"
Is HackerNews web scale?
replies(1): >>2120866 #
1. makmanalp ◴[19 Jan 11 19:16 UTC] No.2120866[source]▶
What does "web scale" mean? I see it thrown around a lot without much explanation.
replies(2): >>2120884 #>>2120916 #
2. klochner ◴[19 Jan 11 19:21 UTC] No.2120884[source]▶
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
replies(1): >>2120903 #
3. Luyt ◴[19 Jan 11 19:28 UTC] No.2120903[source]▶
A transcript can be found at http://mongodb-is-web-scale.com/

"Shards are the secret ingredient in the web scale sauce. They just work."

4. Luyt ◴[19 Jan 11 19:32 UTC] No.2120916[source]▶
I think it means that your web app can survive being slashdotted. So, a lightweight C10K-capable frontend, all static content on a CDN, everything heavily cached, database queries optimized to the hilt, etc... etc... Some people think that just using a NoSQL database is sufficient, but there's much more to it. Interesting talk on this stuff (was posted on HN earlier): http://ontwik.com/python/django-deployment-workshop-by-jacob...