My 486 Server

Infrastructure

self-hosted web server

SHOW HN2022

255points
115comments
#185of 2,570 in 2022
Top 8%of 2022 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

4 positive, 28 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 10 critical, out of 42 comments about the project. Thread score -0.14.

Performance: 1 for, 8 againstDocs: 0 for, 1 againstExecution: 0 for, 1 againstIdea: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Impressive that a custom OS and TCP/IP stack were written from scratch

    From 1 comment
    • Yep this! People would regularly run windows 95 on a 486 with 8-16mb of ram. This was their daily driver which did word, dial up/aol/prodigy, messaging, games, etc. I think the…
      drzaiusapelord on HN

Objections

  • Site struggled or timed out under Hacker News traffic

    From 3 comments
  • A 486 is powerful enough for a web server, so the performance is a software issue

    From 2 comments
    • We used to serve serious traffic off 486 machines, so if anything it's probably a software issue. Perhaps FreeBSD/i386 would be an appropriate choice? If you weren't there you…
      jeffbee on HN
    • Yep this! People would regularly run windows 95 on a 486 with 8-16mb of ram. This was their daily driver which did word, dial up/aol/prodigy, messaging, games, etc. I think the…
      drzaiusapelord on HN

Questions

  • What are the CPU and memory usage under load?

    From 1 comment
    • Can you share how it's doing cpu/memory wise and his it's holding up in general under what I assume I heavy load from HN?
      soupshield on HN
  • What network cards are supported?

    From 1 comment
    • I'm very interested in the network stack, having explored it for a while for https://github.com/akkartik/mu before giving up. What sort of network card do you support?
      akkartik on HN

Alternatives named

  • OpenWRT on a 486 as a lighter embedded server option

    From 1 comment
    • OpenWRT for 486 would be a faster choice. Just crosscompile pkgs from another machine. You'll have http and gopher support granted. If libressl compile and run, place it under…
      anthk on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

Add a badge to your READMEShown on HackerShow
[![Shown on HackerShow](https://hackershow.org/badge.svg)](https://hackershow.org/show/29959129)