Comment by carlsborg

Comment by carlsborg 10 months ago

The main lichess engine (lila, open source) is a single monolith program that's deployed on a single server. It serves ~5 million games per day. But there are a several other pieces too. They discuss the architecture here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crKNBSpO2_I

BTW consider donating if you use lichess.

justinclift 10 months ago

Wow. ~US$40k/mo running costs, with about US$5k/mo for server hosting:

https://lichess.org/costs

It looks like the servers are individually managed via OVH or similar, rather than running their own gear in co-location or similar. Wonder why?

Reply View 15 replies

tormeh 10 months ago

Easy: If something is wrong with the physical gear it's OVH's problem rather than theirs. It also means no one has to ever go to the data center which is probably important for a geographically distributed team (I assume they are). Cheap, no-frills cloud is extremely underrated, IMO.

Reply View | 1 reply
- danpalmer 10 months ago
  
  Underrated? The flip side is that hardware failures are still your problem like they would be with rolling your own hosting. I think they’re correctly rated for the position on the scale of traders that they provide.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
squigz 10 months ago

Surprising numbers, and really goes to show how cheap the hardware/software side is for this sort of thing if you do it right.
I wonder what the "Misc dev salaries" is for - only curious because it's a flat $5k

Reply View | 5 replies
- justinclift 10 months ago
  
  Heh heh heh.
  To me those numbers seem on the high side as I'm (personally) used to (for cheap projects) scavenging together stuff from Ebay before deploying to a data centre. ;)
  
  Reply View | 4 replies
  
  squigz 10 months ago
  
  lichess is hardly a "cheap project" though :P It's one of the most popular chess platforms
  
  Reply View | 3 replies
benmmurphy 10 months ago

its also crazy how much cheaper it is than AWS. the primary DB is around $500/month with 32 CPU and 256 GB of RAM and 7TB. AWS RDS db.m6gd.8xlarge which is 32 CPU and 128 GB of RAM costs $2150/month before paying for storage as well.

Reply View | 6 replies
- bryan_w 10 months ago
  
  Yeah, but you get what you pay for. That m6gd.8xlarge would never be subject to such a long network outage as once the hardware fault was detected, it would be moved to another machine
  
  Reply View | 5 replies
  
  beaviskhan 10 months ago
  
  Yup, and you also get to make AWS deal with OS upgrades, DB upgrades, backups, etc.
  
  Reply View | 4 replies

squigz 10 months ago

https://lichess.org/patron

Reply View 0 replies

hilux 10 months ago

I'm a patron!

I really appreciate the benefits package for patrons. Thibault is zee best.

Reply View 0 replies

jefurii 10 months ago

There's also a nice architectural diagram on their GitHub page: https://github.com/lichess-org/lila

Reply View 0 replies