[freewilly1040]

It's truly amazing that a product with the reach of Lichess can be run so cheaply. Comments here criticizing the hosting costs extremely myopic - dev time isn't free, and doing a rewrite to chase down hosting savings isn't necessarily a good call.

I just signed up for a monthly donation. I complain about the ad supported internet all the time, but had never donated to LiChess. This thread is a good reminder of how far dollars to support projects like this can go.

[lhorie]

FWIW, in the earlier days of lichess, IIRC when it had barely broken the Alexa top 10,000 threshold, lichess ran on like 2 boxes despite serving millions of users.

There's a good chance that many AWS slinging devs here have not actually had to deal with the volume of traffic that lichess sees. Half a mil yearly to run the entire lichess infrastructure, including dev salary and providing stockfish analysis for every user for free takes an insanely efficient setup that most big tech companies could only dream of.

[Tenoke]

> providing stockfish analysis for every user for free

Edit: As discussed in another subthread most of the analysis happens in the user's browser, the rest is run via a fishnet by volunteers.

[lhorie]

While we're in the topic of impressive technological achievements, it's probably also worth mentioning how crazy it is that just a few decades ago, Deep Blue running on a supercomputer was the state of art in chess analysis, and nowadays we can just casually say, oh lichess runs stockfish on users' phones via wasm to cut on server costs.

[epolanski]

Most engineers in the world never saw such daily traffic.

I doubt you can't make Alexa top 10k with a million of daily unique visitors.

[anaganisk]

And people here be afraid of serving small HN traffic without using cloudlfare.