Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit?

pg · on March 12, 2009

There's 4GB of physical memory on the server, but for various reasons we only end up with about 2GB of usable heap space.

Rtm just placed an order for a new server, so we should have more memory and a somewhat faster CPU soon.

thepanister · on March 12, 2009

Well, Don't you think that if you make pagination for comments of a story, that could help?

For example, if a story has 50 comments, then it should be devided into 2 pages, each page shows 25 comments... and as a result it will use less memory?

pg · on March 12, 2009

That would not use less memory. It's not the html pages that are stored in memory, but the individual comments.

thepanister · on March 12, 2009

Yes I know that the individual comments are the ones stored in the memory. But it takes a while to load anyway. like the feature request story... it takes around 11 seconds to load.

Thanks for making it clear to me, I really appreciate it. :)

mixmax · on March 12, 2009

This would presumably give some problems with votes. For instance, a comment in a long thread that starts on page 2 would have a very small chance of making it to page 1 since only a subset of users would look at the second page thus having a chance to vote it up.

Jem · on March 12, 2009

This was discussed in pg's original submission on why things had been slow lately. Do we need this separate submission?

icey · on March 12, 2009

I assume he means the machine YC is hosted on has 2gb of memory.

zacharydanger · on March 12, 2009

Yes, I forgot to mention the link to his original comment, but now I can't find the thread.

thepanister · on March 12, 2009

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512244

Did you mean that one?