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Comment by dang

3 years ago

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.

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dang

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sillysaurusx  3 years ago

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.

  • swyx  3 years ago

    i got that Flexport ad too.. haha kinda alarming if they are the only YC company still hiring

    • dang  3 years ago

      Btw, job ads get queued long in advance and then the software picks the next one when it's time for a job ad. After 8 hours of being down, the software thought it was time for a job ad.