[charcircuit]

>Nice idea, interesting project, next time please contact me before.

It's impossible to predict that one's project may go viral.

>As a single user, you broke the service for everyone.

Or you did by not having a high enough fd limit. Blaming sites when using it too much when you advertise there is no limit is not cool. It's not like wplace themselves were maliciously hammering the API.

[columb]

You are so entitled... Because of you most nice things have "no limits but...". Not cool stress testing someone's infrastructure. Not cool. The author of this post is more than understanding, tried to fix it and offered a solution even after blocking them. On a free service.

Show us what you have done.

[charcircuit]

>You are so entitled

That's how agreements work. If someone says they will sell a hamburger for $5, and another person pays $5 for a hamburger, then they are entitled to a hamburger.

>On a free service.

It's up to the owner to price the service. Being overwhelmed by traffic when there are no limits is not a problem limited only to free services.

[perching_aix]

> Do you offer support and SLA guarantees?

>

> At the moment, I don’t offer SLA guarantees or personalized support.

From the website.

[eszed]

Sure, and if you bulk-order 5k hamburgers the restaurant will honor the price, but they'll also tell you "we're going to need some notice to handle that much product". Perfect analogy, really. This guy handled the situation perfectly, imo.

[charcircuit]

Except in this case the restauraut would have been able to handle the 5k orders if they didn't arbitrarily have their workers work with their hands tied behind their back. And instead of untieing their workers and appreciating the realization they were accidently bottlenecking themselves they blame the nearby event who caused a spike in foot traffic.

Publicly attacking your users instead of celebrating their success and your new learnings is not what I would call handling it perfectly. I think going for a halo effect strategy where you celebrate how people are using your platform to accomplish their goals will help people understand how what is being done is valuable and want people to adopt it or financially support it. On the other hand attacking people who use your platform publicly can make people apprehensive in using it fearing that they will be criticized too.

[austhrow743]

Hamburger situation is not comparable. It’s a trade.

This is just someone being not very specific in a text file on their computer. I have many such notes, some of them publicly viewable.

[010101010101]

Do you expect him just to let the service remain broken or to scale up to infinite cost to himself on this volunteer project? He worked with the project author to find a solution that works for both and does not degrade service for every other user, under literally no obligation to do anything at all. This isn’t Anthropic deciding to throttle users paying hundreds of dollars a month for a subscription. Constructive criticism is one thing, but entitlement to something run by an individual volunteer for free is absurd.

[toast0]

The project page kind of suggests he might scale up to infinite cost...

> Financially, the plan is to keep renting servers until they cover the bandwidth. I believe it can be self-sustainable if enough people subscribe to the support plans.

Especially since he said Cloudflare is providing the CDN for free... Yes, running the origins costs money, but in most cases, default fd limits are low, and you can push them a lot higher. At some point you'll run into i/o limits, but I think the I/O at the origin seems pretty managable if my napkin math was right.

If the files are all tiny, and the fd limit is the actual bottleneck, there's ways to make that work better too. IMHO, it doesn't make sense to accept a inbound connection if you can't get a fd to read a file for it, so better to limit the concurrent connections and let connections sit in the listen queue and have a short keepalive time out to make sure you're not wasting your fds on idle connections. With no other knowledge, I'd put the connection limit at half the FD limit, assuming the origin server is dedicated for this and serves static files exclusively. But, to be honest, if I set up something like this, I probably wouldn't have thought about FD limits until they got hit, so no big deal ... hopefully whatever I used to monitor would include available fds by default and I'd have noticed, but it's not a default output everywhere.

[charcircuit]

We are talking about hosting a fixed amount of static files. This should be a solved problem. This is nothing like running large AI models for people.

[010101010101]

The nature of the service is completely irrelevant.

[charcircuit]

Running a no limit service for free definitely depends on the marginal cost of serving a single request.

[rikafurude21]

the funny part is that his service didnt break- cloudflares cache caught 99% of the requests. just wanted to feel powerful and break the latest viral trend.