rebane2001 7 hours ago

The loading issue is just a hug of death, the site's currently getting multiple visitors per second, and that requires more than a gigabit of bandwidth to handle.

I sort of need to pull all the data at the initialization because I need to map out how every post affects every other - the links between posts are what take up majority of the storage, not the text inside the posts. It's also kind of the only way to preserve privacy.

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jedberg an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I think I'm missing something, but does every user get the same 40MB? If so, can you just dump the file on a CDN?

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goodmythical 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I feel very strongly that you should be able to serve hundreds or thousands of requests at gbps speeds.

Why are you serving so much data personally instead of just reformatting theirs?

Even if you're serving it locally...I mean a regular 100mbit line should easily support tens or hundreds of text users...

What am I missing?

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rebane2001 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Why are you serving so much data personally instead of just reformatting theirs?

Because then you only need to download 40MB of data and do minimal processing. If you were to take the dumps off of Wikimedia, you would need to download 400MB of data and do processing on that data that would take minutes of time.

And also it's kind of rude to hotlink a half a gig of data on someone else's site.

> What am I missing?

40MB per second is 320mbps, so even 3 visitors per second maxes out a gigabit connection.

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goodmythical 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

no but...why are you passing 40mb from your server to my device in a lump like that?

All I'm getting from your serve is a title, a sentence, and an image.

Why not give me say the first 20 and start loading the next 20 when I reach the 10th?

That way you're not getting hit with 40mb for every single click but only a couple of mb per click and a couple more per scroll for users that are actually using the service?

Look at your logs. How many people only ever got the first 40 and clicked off because you're getting ddosed? Every single time that's happened (which is more than a few times based on HN posts), you've not only lost a user but weakened the experience of someone that's chosen to wait by increasing their load time by insisting that they wait for the entire 40MB download.

I am just having trouble understanding why you've decided to make me and your server sit through a 40MB transfer for text and images...

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rebane2001 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> no but...why are you passing 40mb from your server to my device in a lump like that?

Because you need all of the cross-article link data, which is the majority of the 40mb, to run the algorithm. The algorithm does not run on the server, because I care about both user privacy and internet preservation.

Once the 40MB is downloaded, you can go offline, and the algorithm will still work. If you save the index.html and the 40MB file, you can run the entire thing locally.

> actually using the service

This is a fun website, it is not a "service".

> you've not only lost a user but weakened the experience of someone that's chosen to wait by increasing their load time

I make websites for fun. Losing a user doesn't particularly affect me, I don't plan on monetizing this, I just want people to have fun.

Yes, it is annoying that people have to wait a bit for the page to load, but that is only because the project has hundreds of thousands of more eyes on it than I expected it to within the first few hours. I expected this project to get a few hundred visits within the first few hours, in which case the bandwidth wouldn't have been an issue whatsoever.

> I am just having trouble understanding why you've decided to make me and your server sit through a 40MB transfer for text and images...

Running the algorithm locally, privacy, stability, preservation, ability to look at and play with the code, ability to go offline, easy to maintain and host etc.

Besides, sites like Twitter use up like a quarter of that for the JavaScript alone.

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nickorlow 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I believe in privacy but generally people are fine with rec algorithms running on a server if it's transparent enough/self hostable. Mastodon/DuckDuckGo/HN/etc all don't need to download a huge blob locally. (If you do want it to run locally, hosting the blob on a CDN or packaging this as an app and letting someone else host it would probably improve the experience a lot)

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rebane2001 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Mastodon/HN do not have a personalized weighted algorithm. On HN you see what everyone else sees, and on Mastodon the feed is chronological. DuckDuckGo offers some privacy, but still sends your search queries to Bing.

Also, all three of the examples are projects that have years of dev effort and hosting infrastructure behind them - Xikipedia is a project I threw together in less than a day for fun, I don't want to put effort into server-side maintenance and upkeep for such a small project. I just want a static index.html I can throw in /var/www/ and forget.

And re: hosting, my bare metal box is fine. It's just slow right now because it's getting a huge spike of attention. I don't want to pay for a CDN, and I doubt I could host a file getting multiple gigabits per second of traffic for free.

	▲	vages 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I really like how you have done things. Didn’t mind the waiting time. Thank you for making my day a little brighter.

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cwnyth 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Who made you do anything? It's a fun website. If you don't like it, move along or make one yourself. I could understand if you were paying for something, but this is free.

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lazide 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why not…. Load it on demand?

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goodmythical 6 hours ago | parent [-]

That's my point. So confused. Got a ton of users clicking off because of this.

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fgfarben 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The point you're missing is that this website is actually a submarine ad for the domain, xikipedia.org, which the owner is probably trying to sell.

	▲	rebane2001 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's a very silly claim considering I bought the domain the same day I released the project. I'm sure whoever would've been interested in buying the domain could've already swept it up for 10 bucks before me.