4 ms·

Yeah: I honestly don't understand how people build websites that can't handle Hacker News levels of traffic... this site just isn't _that_ popular in the grand

by saurik 7y ago

Yeah: I honestly don't understand how people build websites that can't handle Hacker News levels of traffic... this site just isn't _that_ popular in the grand scheme of things.

jandrese 7y ago
The instant your website requires a database query to build the front page you're susceptible to the HN hug of death. Obviously you can build a scalable solution to handle traffic spikes, but there will always be the danger. If you're talking about an ordinary webserver giving out an ordinary webpage you will run out of bandwidth long before you overload the server.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Yeah; static pages like blog posts should really be cached out from templates + data, to avoid this problem.
- weberc2 7y ago
  Depends on your database. S3 will handle the hug just fine.
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  That's a bit dramatic. I've load-tested database backed sites on $5/month DO droplets and gotten > 1k requests per second for extended tests. My primary site not only stores articles in the DB, but runs them through an extended, custom markdown parser upon retrieval, and processes and reports event data on every page load. It was still successfully returning ~250 reqs/sec before I'd bothered implementing any caching or pre-compilation of markdown at all. In contrast, people recently HNed[1] are reporting about 12-15k visits over a day. That's something a single server on a $5/month VPS can handle in a minute 1) https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lessons-for-entrepreneurs.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lesso...
  - majewsky 7y ago
    > In contrast, people recently HNed[1] are reporting about 12-15k visits over a day. This matches my experience. I think I got about 10k visits over the course of a day, 80% within the first three hours.

4 ms·

Yeah: I honestly don't understand how people build websites that can't handle Hacker News levels of traffic... this site just isn't _that_ popular in the grand

by saurik 7y ago

Yeah: I honestly don't understand how people build websites that can't handle Hacker News levels of traffic... this site just isn't _that_ popular in the grand scheme of things.

jandrese 7y ago
The instant your website requires a database query to build the front page you're susceptible to the HN hug of death. Obviously you can build a scalable solution to handle traffic spikes, but there will always be the danger. If you're talking about an ordinary webserver giving out an ordinary webpage you will run out of bandwidth long before you overload the server.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Yeah; static pages like blog posts should really be cached out from templates + data, to avoid this problem.
- weberc2 7y ago
  Depends on your database. S3 will handle the hug just fine.
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  That's a bit dramatic. I've load-tested database backed sites on $5/month DO droplets and gotten > 1k requests per second for extended tests. My primary site not only stores articles in the DB, but runs them through an extended, custom markdown parser upon retrieval, and processes and reports event data on every page load. It was still successfully returning ~250 reqs/sec before I'd bothered implementing any caching or pre-compilation of markdown at all. In contrast, people recently HNed[1] are reporting about 12-15k visits over a day. That's something a single server on a $5/month VPS can handle in a minute 1) https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lessons-for-entrepreneurs.html https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lesso...
  - majewsky 7y ago
    > In contrast, people recently HNed[1] are reporting about 12-15k visits over a day. This matches my experience. I think I got about 10k visits over the course of a day, 80% within the first three hours.