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I'm always wondering the same. As a pretty noob sysadmin, my dead cheap[0] second-hand dedicated server was able to handle being on the HN homepage for 11ish ho

by r3bl 8y ago

I'm always wondering the same. As a pretty noob sysadmin, my dead cheap[0] second-hand dedicated server was able to handle being on the HN homepage for 11ish hours without breaking a sweat. No CDN was involved what so ever, all content was going directly to my single point of failure. Yet, I have to resort to looking at cashed versions of the submissions from companies that have way more resources than I could ever imagine to have. [0] Price of the cheapest Media Temple VPS offering.

Rjevski 8y ago
Looking at this page's source it seems like Wordpress (or rather Shitpress) is involved, so this downtime is not surprising at all considering how many resources that pile of garbage uses. But yeah, a properly optimized site can handle being on the HN front-page on a single server with no issues.
- SquareWheel 8y ago
  There's plenty of caching plugins that make Wordpress run just fine at higher traffic. This site likely just doesn't have one installed.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    Would you buy a new car if it needed duct tape just so it can stay in one piece while driving on the highway? So why would you think it's acceptable for a CMS to require third-party "cache" plugins just to be able to handle traffic?
    - exikyut 8y ago
      Computers and cars are both solutions to problems, but the complexity of computers is yet to be routinely contained without targeted effort. This is especially true of the Web. Wordpress is the single most installed CMS (and kitchen sink, at this point), it's a massive attack target, and it's installed by people who don't really know what they're doing. Between being a kitchen sink (and having to deal with the internal/external API/architectural [compatibility] baggage that comes with any long-lived implementation) and having to be the CMS equivalent of Windows/macOS, it's a... difficult ask for a WP installation with (say) 30 poorly-constructed addons to to run smoothly. Possible, yes, absolutely, but it'll need tuning. Caching is simply the simplest bandaid that can be tacked on. If the caching is tuned properly, it'll fix everything else. Yes, this will mean the underlying configuration/state will be the digital equivalent of a giant wound you just want to clean out and fix up, but, err... it works. :/
    - rahimnathwani 8y ago
      The vast majority of WordPress-powered sites have no personalised content: the only authenticated users are 1-2 administrators, and 1+ people who add/edit content. For this use-case, it's hard to beat WordPress for features and ease-of-use, especially when you consider the ecosystem of plugins that can add commonly-needed functionality. Sure, you could roll-your-own, and then add some code to generate a sitemap.xml etc., but there's no need. Sure, it doesn't scale without adding caching, but it's trivial to add caching with either a plugin, or by putting varnish or similar in front on the same machine, or using a CDN. Sure, if you have dynamic or personalised content, you'll need to cache further down the stack (e.g. at the database level), and that's less efficient (because you're probably running multiple php files to generate a single HTTP response), but that's not the usual situation.
    - SquareWheel 8y ago
      That analogy really has no real relevance to the discussion as far as I can see. Caches help dynamic sites scale up to meet large amounts of traffic. If you don't want to use a WP plugin then use Varnish instead.
exikyut 8y ago
Hrm. Very well put :) thankyou for this perspective. Highly appreciated. I hadn't really factored in website optimization. Who knows if each page load is chewing CPU for a couple of seconds because of an unoptimized query. I was only reading the other day about a random situation along those kinds of lines...

by r3bl 8y ago

Rjevski 8y ago

Looking at this page's source it seems like Wordpress (or rather Shitpress) is involved, so this downtime is not surprising at all considering how many resources that pile of garbage uses. But yeah, a properly optimized site can handle being on the HN front-page on a single server with no issues.

SquareWheel 8y ago
There's plenty of caching plugins that make Wordpress run just fine at higher traffic. This site likely just doesn't have one installed.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Would you buy a new car if it needed duct tape just so it can stay in one piece while driving on the highway? So why would you think it's acceptable for a CMS to require third-party "cache" plugins just to be able to handle traffic?
  - exikyut 8y ago
    Computers and cars are both solutions to problems, but the complexity of computers is yet to be routinely contained without targeted effort. This is especially true of the Web. Wordpress is the single most installed CMS (and kitchen sink, at this point), it's a massive attack target, and it's installed by people who don't really know what they're doing. Between being a kitchen sink (and having to deal with the internal/external API/architectural [compatibility] baggage that comes with any long-lived implementation) and having to be the CMS equivalent of Windows/macOS, it's a... difficult ask for a WP installation with (say) 30 poorly-constructed addons to to run smoothly. Possible, yes, absolutely, but it'll need tuning. Caching is simply the simplest bandaid that can be tacked on. If the caching is tuned properly, it'll fix everything else. Yes, this will mean the underlying configuration/state will be the digital equivalent of a giant wound you just want to clean out and fix up, but, err... it works. :/
  - rahimnathwani 8y ago
    The vast majority of WordPress-powered sites have no personalised content: the only authenticated users are 1-2 administrators, and 1+ people who add/edit content. For this use-case, it's hard to beat WordPress for features and ease-of-use, especially when you consider the ecosystem of plugins that can add commonly-needed functionality. Sure, you could roll-your-own, and then add some code to generate a sitemap.xml etc., but there's no need. Sure, it doesn't scale without adding caching, but it's trivial to add caching with either a plugin, or by putting varnish or similar in front on the same machine, or using a CDN. Sure, if you have dynamic or personalised content, you'll need to cache further down the stack (e.g. at the database level), and that's less efficient (because you're probably running multiple php files to generate a single HTTP response), but that's not the usual situation.
  - SquareWheel 8y ago
    That analogy really has no real relevance to the discussion as far as I can see. Caches help dynamic sites scale up to meet large amounts of traffic. If you don't want to use a WP plugin then use Varnish instead.

exikyut 8y ago

Hrm. Very well put :) thankyou for this perspective. Highly appreciated. I hadn't really factored in website optimization. Who knows if each page load is chewing CPU for a couple of seconds because of an unoptimized query. I was only reading the other day about a random situation along those kinds of lines...