lukhas

It seems to be working mildly better in Chromium than in Firefox, but I still got that "Dashboard temporarily unavailable" error on most of my refreshes.

Of course now that I gave up on them it seems to be back online, all without a hint of an issue on their status page...

We're an understaffed charity.

As mentionned elsewhere, we're renting most of our infra from OVH, and paying, monthly, for 40TB of SSDs or NVMes would simply explode our yearly budget.

Source: am président of the lichess charity (and also one of the sysadmins)

We're up to 2 employees now! The founder and a mobile dev.

The impact on costs is "not small", because as a rough estimate, the charity pays overall about twice what the dev gets in take-home money, because French employer taxes are high (keyword for the Frenchies reading us: URSSAF).

Source: am President of the Lichess charity and have the honour and pleasure of dealing with most of the French administrative paperwork.

Nothing is modest at Lichess scale, we have a few million users, several thousand of them post in forums daily and chat with each other.

Also, we're a chess website with more than one million games per day, and some people like to cheat. We're classifying "fair play and anti-cheating" as "moderation" in our expenses because the two are intertwined.

Lichess is a non-profit with hundreds of volunteers, several part-time paid contributors/moderators and 2 full-time devs, not a company.

(I'm a Lichess sysadmin & trustee)

So far France has given us exactly 0 euros and 0 cents, but has required us to hire and pay an accounting company to certify our books due to the level of donations we're receiving.

We could maybe argue that being allowed to exist as a non-profit is something France deserves kudos for, if you're in a good mood.

Lichess sysadmin (and trustee) here!

We're paying taxes on our employees, they're paid like regular French employees and therefore the employer is taxed accordingly. This is not income tax on our donations or swag sales.

I would prefer if the non-profit in France were "employer-taxed" less than for-profit companies, but no one seems to care.

Lichess sysadmin here!

We're self-hosting most of our infra on bare-metal, on the best price/quality hosting provider I know of (OVH). I doubt you could store ~1TB of metrics going back 4 or 5 years on fast NVMe storage for less than this in the cloud.

Currently it's "-Xms30g -Xmx30g -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+PrintCodeCache -XX:ProfiledCodeHeapSize=500m -XX:NonProfiledCodeHeapSize=500m -XX:NonNMethodCodeHeapSize=24m -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=1024m -XX:InitialCodeCacheSize=1024m -XX:ParallelGCThreads=24"

Everything after G1GC was suggested by various helpful experts on HN, Discord, by email and other media.