Hayden is a 4chan / altchan archiver written in .NET Core for ultra-low resource usage and high performance.
It also doubles as imageboard software.
It was originally writen as a drop-in alternative to Asagi, however Asagi compatibility currently has no guarantees.
Developer documentation is in ARCHITECTURE.md.
README for running the scraper
README for running the webserver / imageboard
| Software | API-less fallback | Example sites |
|---|---|---|
| Yotsuba | ❌ | 4chan.org |
| LynxChan | ❌ | 8chan.moe endchan.org |
| Vichan/Infinity (not OpenIB/8kun) | ❌ | sportschan.org smuglo.li |
| InfinityNext | ❌ | 9chan.tw |
| Meguca / shamichan | ✅ | 2chen.moe shamik.ooo |
| FoolFuuka | ❌ | desuarchive.org |
| Ponychan | ❌ | ponychan.net |
| ASPNetChan | ✅ | mlpol.net |
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Much smaller memory consumption than Asagi.
- For comparison, Hayden requires roughly 40MB of working memory to archive a single board (including all archived threads), while Asagi consumes several gigabytes to do the same.
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Uses a much more efficient algorithm to perform API calls, reducing overall network calls made considerably and eliminates cloudflare rate limit issues.
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Supports using multiple SOCKS proxies to distribute network load and allow parallel network operations.
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Supports writing to multiple types of data stores.
- Thread ID-based scraping system. Currently the only logic for thread archival operates on a per-board basis
I wanted to archive 4chan threads and display them, but didn't like what was already offered. As per usual, this turned into making a very large project to do so.
Why C#? Doesn't it have a GC like Java and other managed languages, and consume a lot of memory as a result?
Yeah sure. Maybe you could get better performance / memory usage out of something like Rust.
But you could also just not be wasteful and be considerate of how you structure your data, and achieve very similar results?
I was listening to the Doom 2016 soundtrack as I was programming this.
I was not a fan of Eternal.