Thanks for the load test, HN! :) Several hundred users spinning up instances of apps yet the server hasn't broken a sweat...

We still need your help to get this into production. Please check out the crowdfunding campaign: http://igg.me/at/sandstorm

Great stuff. Could you share some data on the server and the traffic? Ram/cores/uplink? This looks like the kind of stuff I've been thinking about for a long time - will have look at the code and test it on a server. Is everything in place to run a clone of your demo server easily?

Over the course of yesterday we had 747 demo users launch 952 app instances.

Currently we're on GCE for price reasons, though we're looking for good non-Google, non-Amazon options for our eventual release.

Sandstorm tends to be memory-bottlenecked since we're launching separate instances of each app for each user, although we make up a lot of it by shutting down instances when they aren't in active use.

I was super-paranoid about the demo totally breaking under load (having not tried this before), so I upped the server to GCE's largest-memory instance at 104GB of RAM.

That turned out to be completely unnecessary. It never used more than 6GB (and CPU was mostly negligible). Doh. Oh well, better to have spent too much than too little.

We also have a separate front-end server which does our SSL, so that our private keys don't reside on the same server as apps, just as an extra precaution. That machine is just a regular n1-standard-1 instance. CPU usage was in the single digit percentages there as well.

You can indeed run your own Sandstorm instance. There are installation instructions in our Github readme: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm

Feel free to send me questions.