Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by trumpdong 7 days ago
Do you have any concerns about performance? The original reason nginx displaced Apache was to replace a thread-per-request model with an epoll state-machine model. I think Apache now supports the latter, though? In the age of AI scraping, you probably don't want to be prematurely pessimizing.
1 comments

That’s not really an issue for me. I use this setup for small internal stuff. It might have 300 users at most, and they aren’t making constant requests. I run it on a small VM and only run into issues when someone dumps in so much data that PHP runs out of memory, which isn’t an Apache issue. And that memory issue doesn’t take down the site or server, it’s just the one request that dies. That used to happen maybe 5 times per year and was almost always due to user error (they screwed up something to end up with that much data in the first place). Some things changed and that particular tool is gone, so there should be no more issues with that.

I think a lot of people build everything assuming it will be the next Facebook, when it’s not. This leads to a lot of complexity in the name of potential future scale that never comes. For some, they are building the dream, but for an internal enterprise tool, mostly geared toward one team (which filtered out a little beyond into the org), I’m not worried about it.

The current setup has been running for 10 years now with minimal maintenance. Just moving it as needed to avoid EOL operating systems and platforms. For something that is a nice-to-have and never felt like a main deliverable for my job, this is ideal.

I almost rewrote it in python once, and planned to host that with nginx, but then I came to my senses.