8 hours of downtime, but not data loss, since there was no data to lose during the downtime.
Last post before we went down (2022-07-08 12:46:04 UTC): https://hn.algolia.com/) just before we brought HN back up, and their most recent comment and story were behind ours. That means our last backup on the ill-fated server was taken after the last API update (HN Search relies on our API), and the API gets updated every 30 seconds.
I'm not saying that's a rock-solid argument, but it suggests that 30 seconds is an upper bound on how much data we lost.
Curiosity got the better of me. Why was there a 6 ID gap between the last post and first post? The answer seems to be that admins were making posts, which is neat. (There was also one lonely Flexport job ad.)
Is your backup system tied to your API? Algolia is a third party service, and streaming the latest HN data to Algolia seems pretty similar to streaming it to a backup system.
> So that means dataloss.. Probably restored from backup.
If the server went down at XX:XX, and the backup they restored from is also from XX:XX, there isn't dataloss. If the server was down for 8 hours, the last data being 8 hours old isn't dataloss, it's correct.
So that means dataloss.. Probably restored from backup.
Good news for people who were banned, or for posts that didn't get enough momentum :)
edit: Was restored from backup.. so def. dataloss
8 hours of downtime, but not data loss, since there was no data to lose during the downtime.
Last post before we went down (2022-07-08 12:46:04 UTC): https://hn.algolia.com/) just before we brought HN back up, and their most recent comment and story were behind ours. That means our last backup on the ill-fated server was taken after the last API update (HN Search relies on our API), and the API gets updated every 30 seconds.
I'm not saying that's a rock-solid argument, but it suggests that 30 seconds is an upper bound on how much data we lost.
Curiosity got the better of me. Why was there a 6 ID gap between the last post and first post? The answer seems to be that admins were making posts, which is neat. (There was also one lonely Flexport job ad.)
Is your backup system tied to your API? Algolia is a third party service, and streaming the latest HN data to Algolia seems pretty similar to streaming it to a backup system.
8 replies →
> So that means dataloss.. Probably restored from backup.
If the server went down at XX:XX, and the backup they restored from is also from XX:XX, there isn't dataloss. If the server was down for 8 hours, the last data being 8 hours old isn't dataloss, it's correct.