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

Posted by zacharydanger on Thursday March 12, 2009 @01:07PM
from the self-post dept.

32-bit systems can handle up to 4GB and any modern Linux system with a CPU that supports Physical Address Extension can use up to 64GB.

How are you coming up with your 2GB limitation?

( 9 comments | 4 points | on HN )

Re:Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit? by pg on Thursday March 12, 2009 @01:13PM (#513724)

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.

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Re:Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit? by thepanister on Thursday March 12, 2009 @01:18PM (#513730)

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?

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Re:Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit? by pg on Thursday March 12, 2009 @01:23PM (#513740)

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

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Re:Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit? by thepanister on Thursday March 12, 2009 @01:28PM (#513746)

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. :)

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Re:Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit? by mixmax on Thursday March 12, 2009 @02:08PM (#513796)

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.

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Re:Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit? by Jem on Thursday March 12, 2009 @01:14PM (#513726)

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

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Re:Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit? by icey on Thursday March 12, 2009 @01:11PM (#513719)

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

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Re:Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit? by zacharydanger on Thursday March 12, 2009 @01:14PM (#513725)

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

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Re:Ask PG: What's up with the 2GB limit? by thepanister on Thursday March 12, 2009 @01:26PM (#513745)

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

Did you mean that one?

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