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15 years, one server, 8GB RAM and 500k users – how Webminal refuses to die
- treysu 6mo ago[dead]
- sudo_cowsay 6mo agoI've never tried Webminal (only used Linode for it's simplicity). But, it seems great. I'll probably try it out.
- giis 6mo agoSure thanks, Let me know if you have feedback.
- sudo_cowsay 6mo agoI really like the ease of use of the site. It's also very clean. However, when you go into the Linux, there is a bit of latency (very noticeable). I know that it's impossible to remove the latency completely (it is what it is), but is there a way to slightly reduce it?
- giis 6mo agoThere will be little latency if you access from different region. Server located at Singapore. From India, I checked right now directly via this link https://www.webminal.org/terminal/proxy/index/ https://www.webminal.org/terminal/proxy/index/ I dont see much issue. I use firefox/chrome on Debian. May be try with different browser?
- sudo_cowsay 6mo agoHow does it only work on 8gb of RAM if it serves 500k users (albeit not all 500k at once)?
- giis 6mo agoOnly UML is the resource consuming part kept as option available on request. Rest of them all shared Shellinabox, nginx,Flask and each active user session consumes little RAM since its a shared terminal. Simple `ls /home` shows all other users on that server!
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 6mo agoWell that server is worth 1M due to the 8GB RAM now!
- user34283 6mo agoI wonder how much money went into the hosting over the years. A year ago I bought a Intel N100 Mini PC with 16 GB DDR5 RAM and a 512 GB SSD for $170. Maybe it could have hosted the site too. It's certainly a lot faster than Azure VMs with 4 "vCPUs".
- PunchyHamster 6mo ago2x the cost of power is probably reasonable number to use
- user34283 6mo agoWith the N100, the yearly cost depending on load and electricity price is probably between $20-$60.
- harias 6mo agoIt's been a while since I've used it but Google cloud shell is a good free platform for learning Linux commands as well https://shell.cloud.google.com https://shell.cloud.google.com
- tuananh 6mo agoiximuiz also give you 1 hour per day free i think. very easy to use. almost instant.
- ramon156 6mo agoblegh, the content is interesting but i've grown numb towards AI speak. It's so generic that I lose interest halfway through.
- andai 6mo agoYeah, the content itself is amazing but the AI writing detracts from that. I'd much rather read broken English than GPT output. That being said I really enjoyed reading this, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.
- heyethan 6mo ago[flagged]
- kevinbaiv 6mo ago[flagged]
- actionfromafar 6mo agoUser mode linux is so cool.
- giis 6mo agoYes, User mode linux pretty cool project. If I'm not wrong, UML is kind of predecessor to gvisor or firecracker from a different era.
- devnotes77 6mo ago[dead]
- arjie 6mo agoThat's wonderful and I know why it's an Indian founder. Was so hard to get a remote shell back then. Indian debit cards didn't work online reliably and so on. So what's the hardware underneath? Cloud server or on-prem? These days the world is amazing. Oracle Cloud gives you a ton for free. But perhaps there's some niche where this is useful. I have to say that this shared screen comms system is outrageously crazy, hahaha.
- giis 6mo agoIt began as on-prem, Freston hosted in his house (we shared server cost, some people called it crazy, because I sent money to someone I met in Linuxforums.org and never seen this person, even via internet, I trusted him because I know him for few years on that forum) After 3 years or so we moved on to cloud servers. Mostly switching from one infra and another if we get some credits :D Couple of years we had Linode sponsoring those nodes until its acquisition. >shared screen comms system is outrageously crazy, Thats Freston idea. I remember our typically chat begins with something like "Hey Laks, Can you see me typing!" ;)
- xantronix 6mo agoConstraints are beautiful.
- andai 6mo agoThis is so fascinating, I've never heard of UML! How many users can this support simultaneously? It says 256MB RAM per user, 8GB total on server? But it's probably more than 32 simultaneous users?
- giis 6mo agoIn past I have seen around 10 process, but I think with current setup, it could support around upto 20 UML. Remember this runs on the same server where others login and get their normal bash account too. So not a dedicated UML server.
- andai 6mo agoThanks. Interesting, that's slightly less than I expected with 500,000 users!
- caijia 6mo agoUML is a smart call, and reminds me when I built an inventory and shift scheduling system on wordpress in 2017. somtimes the "wrong" / "old" tool for some job is exactly right for you if you really understand it. UML is old but fits here. 15 years is long enough to call memory about a lot of things.
- internet_points 6mo agoAll that on a single Github Sponsor[0]. [0] https://github.com/sponsors/Lakshmipathi https://github.com/sponsors/Lakshmipathi
- giis 6mo agoActually I opened up GitHub Sponsor just few weeks ago. Few tims i received enquiry from users (professors) who wanted to contribute back.only now i have proper channel to redirect such requests.
- gchamonlive 6mo agoWould UML be similar to Incus running unprivileged VMs?
- mikkupikku 6mo agoTo be fair. 8GB of ram is huge. I don't know, maybe I'm stuck in the early 00s but even 2 GB of ram still seems extravagant; I remember when that was an exotic amount of RAM for dedicated gamers to play extremely high fidelity games, so for a mere web server 8 GB of ram almost seems like absurd overkill. I still feel a tinge of shame whenever I see any software of my own using more than a few hundred megabytes. What a waste.
- giis 6mo agoUntil few days server ago was using 8GB and I did a cost cutting measure and its running on 4GB server for last week or so. :)
- aduty 6mo agoI remember when 16 MB was considered a lot. Then again, I also remember when graphics acceleration was considered optional.
- seethishat 6mo agoThe major difference, here, is this is intended for multiple users (not one person). Imaging 5,000 users all using the device at the same time. The amount of memory, open file handles, network connections, etc. for many users at once adds up.
- dhosek 6mo agoThe IBM mainframe that I used at UIC in the 80s had 64 MEGA bytes of RAM and about double the users.
- BLKNSLVR 6mo agoOld school internet. Internet done right. Great work giis. I haven't used it, I didn't know it existed until now, but I'm happy it exists and has been providing service to those who need it. There should be more of this.
- giis 6mo agoThanks, most of these came out restriction, we cant afford to throw money on horizontal scaling (adding more server,load server etc). So we kind of forced to try out new things to keep cost affordable. There are many thing left out on above doc: IIRC, we started with openvz and even today our security relies on SELinux, how we remapped user account creation with pre-existing templates for ext4 quota, we moved to xfs because of flexibility. Mysqldb quota/limits, fork bombs by college/school students bringing out docker environment. Old school internet is right term.
- gk-- 6mo agorestrictions lead to clever and optimized solutions. well done!
- fleroviumna 6mo ago[dead]
- adamm255 6mo agoThe way the stack is described reminded me of this masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE9W9Ghe4Jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE9W9Ghe4Jk
- lvl155 6mo agoYou just might break that 10K visit from Spanish tech blog in 2017.
- ggandhi 6mo agoThis is a very inspiring entrepreneurial story. The story of not giving up.
- Serhii-Set 6mo ago[dead]
- znpy 6mo ago> User Mode Linux Oh man, what a blast from the past. I have fond memories of learning linux networking with netkit (based on UML). UML was a really really cool piece of technology. If anybody is wondering, User Mode Linux lets you boot a Linux kernel as a normal linux process, and then run an userspace, still in a linux process. This is from 2001. Super cool.
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoI was trying to remember what this was called the other day, for some reason. It turns out that if you run a uml kernel and point its root at the root of the disk the host Linux is running on, there's a hell of a turf war between the two and no-one wins.
- farceSpherule 6mo ago[dead]
- riverforest 6mo agoThis is the post that should be required reading before anyone spins up a Kubernetes cluster for their side project.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- BirAdam 6mo agoWell... The best days were just putting hardware in a 2U box, racking it, and paying a bit for power and networking. This was such an easier time, and a handful of core 2 duos were fully capable of streaming 1080p video to around a million daus. Of course, there's far more money in really fancy shared hosting that wastes resources, so that's the current model. Then you market to C-level folks that "real companies" host on AWS or Azure, and that all others options are "unserious." If your opex for compute isn't a million, you're wrong.
- jamiemallers 6mo ago[dead]
- luckypeter 6mo ago[dead]
- essnine 6mo agoIt takes a lot of guts to run something like this for years on end, kudos to you for setting this up and running it for all these years. I am wondering if you'd ever come across pubnixes or tilde servers when you first started up webminal?
- ryguz 6mo ago[dead]
- mig39 6mo agoI didn't know about Webminal until today. Going to try it with some college students this afternoon!
- giis 6mo agoSure. We had quite a lot of universities and schools used this platform for their classes. I'll be away from system for next 48hrs though.Drop us a mail,will respond.