[axod]

2-4GB? wth are you doing?

I remember a post on here saying how hackernews was running on a new 8GB server or something. There's no reason it couldn't run on a 200MB server easily.

(Related: Is HN really sluggish for everyone else as well? Like 3-4 seconds per page load)

[rms]

If you really think you could run HN on 200MB of RAM, write a blog post about how to do it and submit it here. I'm sure the community would like to know how. I think your ability to write applications using minimal amounts of RAM is out of sync with the median RAM use here.

[axod]

It'd mean writing in some 'un-hip' language. So I doubt anyone would be interested in it here.

Using even 1GB of RAM for something like HN is just crazy.

[peterwwillis]

with a stripped down/custom distro and FastCGI perl i could make that happen. you could go crazy and use an epoll perl httpd too. backend would be nosql with a small cache in memory. you'd need a decent chunk of bandwidth as gzip may push cpu over the edge, and hope you have fast disks. how many hps is HN anyway, at peak?