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Comment by fastest963 | Hacker News Reader

Why does the Harbor VM need 32 cores and 64GB of RAM? Especially if it's only serving 32,000 pulls over 2 months.

For what it's worth, I have an on-prem Nexus server with a Docker repository. It has 8 cores and 16GB RAM. It has 82000 hits/day in the webserver log, though 99.9% of them transfer only a few kB, so I assume it's a metadata check and the client already has the correct version.

The same Nexus is also hosting our Maven and NodeJS repositories. That has 1,800,000 hits per day, although all but 120,000 of them return HTTP 404. (I think one of our clients has misconfigured their build server to use our Maven repository as a mirror of Maven Central, but as it's just an AWS IP I don't know who it is.)

I'm sure it's overprovisioned, but the marginal cost of 2, 4 or 8 cores and 4, 8 or 16GB RAM isn't much when we buy our own hardware.

> the marginal cost of 2, 4 or 8 cores and 4, 8 or 16GB RAM isn't much when we buy our own hardware

this is the crux of it all. RENTING bare metal (eg from hetzner) is 10x cheaper than aws ec2. So, I can only imagine how much cheaper it is when you buy the hardware directly.

At a very rough estimate with Hetzner's calculator, which doesn't have exactly the systems I most recently bought, our servers cost about 18 months of renting the closest Hetzner dedicated server.

Add to that rackspace costs, staff time doing installation (or cost of remote hands etc). I don't have our figures for rackspace costs, but staff time is fairly low — an hour or two when the server is purchased and later thrown out, and maybe the same to replace a HDD at some point in the 5-8 years we keep it.

Also add the time to get competing quotes from Dell, HP etc and decide on the configuration, but then a similar process is needed to choose from Hetzner vs their competitors.

Amazing. So it isn't so much that Hetzner is crazy cheap, but that everyone else is crazy expensive

I want something like "This could have been an email" but "This could have been a Caddy instance and static files"

Hell Git doesn't even need the Git protocol if you do `update-server-info`

It does seem mostly possible to host a Docker registry with static files and a bit of config:

https://github.com/jpetazzo/registrish

I haven’t tried running this yet, but it seems worth keeping in mind. It’s relatively simple software so the idea could probably be pretty easily adapted to other situations.

I recall mentioned here ttl.sh, which as I looked it up [0], uses through Docker a CNCF project called Distribution Registry [1] which implements the core container registry functions (and appears to have additional utility, like being a pull-through cache).

0. https://github.com/replicatedhq/ttl.sh/blob/main/registry/en...

1. https://distribution.github.io/distribution/

It's certainly possible with s3, so probably for any other static host https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40942732

It does seem like a lot. Though, it's also a rounding error for them. It is probably sized to optimize for something else than just $

Agree that seems insanely inefficient. That's less than a pull a minute.

FWIW,

   > During this time, Harbor has served more than 32,000 pulls under company-wide use in day-to-day business.

It is possible to read this as the "32,000 pulls" is a daily number, not a total one.

Even if it is a daily number, it's not very much. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. Even limiting the time to an 8 hour business day, this is only around 1 pull per second.

> Why does the Harbor VM need ...

They never say that it needs these resources, they say that the current VM has this config. Probably overkill by 1000%.

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