[HN Gopher] A bit on scaling chess.com's database
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A bit on scaling chess.com's database
Author : ikonic89
Score : 72 points
Date : 2021-01-11 16:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unstructed.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (unstructed.tech)
| yardstick wrote:
| ikonic89: how large is the database? The charts showed disk
| utilisation % but would be interested to know raw sizes.
| dontbesquare wrote:
| I was in the Phish vs. phans chess.com match on NYE. I was
| wondering how this is handled. Fascinating! Thanks for sharing.
| ikonic89 wrote:
| Glad you liked it :)
| oli5679 wrote:
| If anyone is interested in online chess, https://lichess.org/ is
| a really interesting project. It is non-for-profit, avoiding
| freemium upselling and instead relying on user donations
|
| Here is a great talk by the founder
|
| https://youtu.be/LZgyVadkgmI
|
| And here is the open-sourced code.
|
| https://github.com/lichess-org
| jka wrote:
| Very enjoyable talk, thanks for sharing. Funny (amusing) to
| hear that lichess' competitors would pay professionals _not_ to
| pay on lichess. Perhaps unsurprising in the era of influencers?
| oli5679 wrote:
| Yes Thibault Duplessis is a very funny guy and has made
| something great without capturing any personal value!
| x32n23nr wrote:
| > Funny (amusing) to hear that lichess' competitors would pay
| professionals not to pay on lichess
|
| That is true, nevertheless, many of the same Grandmasters
| still play using anonymous accounts. For obvious reasons, we
| should not point out which accounts these are.
| forinti wrote:
| > No foreign keys, many things were done in the code itself
| (filtering, sorting, etc, to make sure the DB only ever uses the
| most efficient indexes)
|
| This normally is terrible advice. You have to be sure that you
| really need it. Too often I see developers do this needlessly.
| ikonic89 wrote:
| Yeah, I can agree with that. You really need to know what
| you're doing. We have benchmarks for most of such "micro-
| optimizations", though now we can know how things are going to
| behave before we even make them, just from the experience.
|
| Definitely not something I'd suggest on an average traffic
| website.
| zappo2938 wrote:
| They mention the huge bump in traffic from Netflix's "The Queen's
| Gambit". However, it is worth seeing the Google Trend for
| searches for both the show and chess since they wrote the blog
| post. Initially there was correlation between interest in the
| show and the game, however, as interest in the show wained,
| interest in the game remains steadily high.
| ikonic89 wrote:
| You are 100% correct. We expected to see a drop in activity
| after the interest in show reduced, but we're still hitting
| records day after day. Crazy.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| My theory is online streaming is more of a factor than the
| show
| ajkjk wrote:
| anecdotally: it's because a bunch of chess Twitch and
| Youtube people have been building up communities + meme-
| scapes around the game. QG added a bunch of new people who
| found the online community and got into it -- especially
| because with the pandemic people have been wandering the
| internet searching (unintentionally) for new hobbies to get
| invested in.
| conradfr wrote:
| Having not played in years and like everyone else I guess I went
| to chess.com after watching the Queen's Gambit, which they
| mention was an even bigger peak than lockdown, and I was
| impressed by the site: you can play immediately without
| registering and the user interface is nice and intuitive.
|
| It's very refreshing.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| https://lichess.org/ is also very good. You can play without
| registering, all features are available to everyone for free,
| and the site is open source. It's a good clean website without
| ads or tracking.
|
| (I used to be bitter about chess.com, thinking they're just
| cashing in on their domain name and charging for features
| because they can. And that may be, I don't know. But I have
| seen them organize some good chess events, so they might not be
| all bad. I think they pay streamers to use their site though, a
| practice I'm not too happy about.)
| ptudan wrote:
| What's so bad about influencer marketing? It is the norm
| these days. Inevitably competition will do it if you don't.
| oli5679 wrote:
| As an online chess player I find it a bit shady.
|
| Lichess.org has a better UX and featureset for free than a
| premium chess.com subscription, but many of my friends
| watch steamers --> sign up to chess.com and get a worse
| expereince.
| __s wrote:
| I was bitter towards chess.com after they sent me my password
| through the forgot password process
|
| That was a decade ago though. Maybe they've improved
| conradfr wrote:
| I think you mean .org and yeah that seems alright and the
| open-sourcing is interesting (resisting trolling on node ;).
|
| It's all about SEO, chess.com is the first result on Google
| and DDG for "chess".
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Thanks for the correction: https://lichess.org/
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(page generated 2021-01-11 22:01 UTC)