15 years, one server, 8GB RAM and 500k users – how Webminal refuses to die

(community.webminal.org)

134 points | by giis 5 hours ago

17 comments

  • BLKNSLVR 59 minutes ago
    Old school internet. Internet done right.

    Great work giis.

    I haven't used it, I didn't know it existed until now, but I'm happy it exists and has been providing service to those who need it. There should be more of this.

    • giis 34 minutes ago
      Thanks, most of these came out restriction, we cant afford to throw money on horizontal scaling (adding more server,load server etc). So we kind of forced to try out new things to keep cost affordable. There are many thing left out on above doc: IIRC, we started with openvz and even today our security relies on SELinux, how we remapped user account creation with pre-existing templates for ext4 quota, we moved to xfs because of flexibility. Mysqldb quota/limits, fork bombs by college/school students bringing out docker environment. Old school internet is right term.
  • caijia 3 hours ago
    UML is a smart call, and reminds me when I built an inventory and shift scheduling system on wordpress in 2017.

    somtimes the "wrong" / "old" tool for some job is exactly right for you if you really understand it. UML is old but fits here.

    15 years is long enough to call memory about a lot of things.

  • mikkupikku 1 hour ago
    To be fair. 8GB of ram is huge. I don't know, maybe I'm stuck in the early 00s but even 2 GB of ram still seems extravagant; I remember when that was an exotic amount of RAM for dedicated gamers to play extremely high fidelity games, so for a mere web server 8 GB of ram almost seems like absurd overkill. I still feel a tinge of shame whenever I see any software of my own using more than a few hundred megabytes. What a waste.
    • aduty 57 minutes ago
      I remember when 16 MB was considered a lot. Then again, I also remember when graphics acceleration was considered optional.
    • giis 44 minutes ago
      Until few days server ago was using 8GB and I did a cost cutting measure and its running on 4GB server for last week or so. :)
  • arjie 3 hours ago
    That's wonderful and I know why it's an Indian founder. Was so hard to get a remote shell back then. Indian debit cards didn't work online reliably and so on. So what's the hardware underneath? Cloud server or on-prem?

    These days the world is amazing. Oracle Cloud gives you a ton for free. But perhaps there's some niche where this is useful. I have to say that this shared screen comms system is outrageously crazy, hahaha.

    • giis 3 hours ago
      It began as on-prem, Freston hosted in his house (we shared server cost, some people called it crazy, because I sent money to someone I met in Linuxforums.org and never seen this person, even via internet, I trusted him because I know him for few years on that forum) After 3 years or so we moved on to cloud servers. Mostly switching from one infra and another if we get some credits :D Couple of years we had Linode sponsoring those nodes until its acquisition.

      >shared screen comms system is outrageously crazy,

      Thats Freston idea. I remember our typically chat begins with something like "Hey Laks, Can you see me typing!" ;)

  • harias 4 hours ago
    It's been a while since I've used it but Google cloud shell is a good free platform for learning Linux commands as well

    https://shell.cloud.google.com

  • heyethan 4 hours ago
    Feels like the real value here is zero setup.

    Even spinning up a VM can be enough friction for beginners. A browser shell is kind of “good enough” for that.

    Probably why tools like this keep sticking around. Wanna try.

  • internet_points 2 hours ago
    All that on a single Github Sponsor[0].

    [0] https://github.com/sponsors/Lakshmipathi

  • andai 3 hours ago
    This is so fascinating, I've never heard of UML!

    How many users can this support simultaneously? It says 256MB RAM per user, 8GB total on server? But it's probably more than 32 simultaneous users?

    • giis 3 hours ago
      In past I have seen around 10 process, but I think with current setup, it could support around upto 20 UML. Remember this runs on the same server where others login and get their normal bash account too. So not a dedicated UML server.
  • Fire-Dragon-DoL 4 hours ago
    Well that server is worth 1M due to the 8GB RAM now!
    • user34283 3 hours ago
      I wonder how much money went into the hosting over the years.

      A year ago I bought a Intel N100 Mini PC with 16 GB DDR5 RAM and a 512 GB SSD for $170.

      Maybe it could have hosted the site too. It's certainly a lot faster than Azure VMs with 4 "vCPUs".

  • gchamonlive 1 hour ago
    Would UML be similar to Incus running unprivileged VMs?
  • sudo_cowsay 5 hours ago
    I've never tried Webminal (only used Linode for it's simplicity). But, it seems great. I'll probably try it out.
    • giis 4 hours ago
      Sure thanks, Let me know if you have feedback.
      • sudo_cowsay 2 hours ago
        I really like the ease of use of the site. It's also very clean. However, when you go into the Linux, there is a bit of latency (very noticeable). I know that it's impossible to remove the latency completely (it is what it is), but is there a way to slightly reduce it?
      • sudo_cowsay 2 hours ago
        How does it only work on 8gb of RAM if it serves 500k users (albeit not all 500k at once)?
  • actionfromafar 4 hours ago
    User mode linux is so cool.
    • giis 3 hours ago
      Yes, User mode linux pretty cool project. If I'm not wrong, UML is kind of predecessor to gvisor or firecracker from a different era.
  • kevinbaiv 4 hours ago
    This is a good reminder that good enough + zero setup often beats more powerful solutions.
  • tuananh 4 hours ago
    iximuiz also give you 1 hour per day free i think.

    very easy to use. almost instant.

  • fleroviumna 13 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • treysu 5 hours ago
    [dead]
  • ramon156 4 hours ago
    blegh, the content is interesting but i've grown numb towards AI speak. It's so generic that I lose interest halfway through.
    • andai 3 hours ago
      Yeah, the content itself is amazing but the AI writing detracts from that. I'd much rather read broken English than GPT output.

      That being said I really enjoyed reading this, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.