When you post stuff on HN, the visitors don't usually come in an orderly queue at the same rate for 24 hours. There is most likely a spike where most of the vis

When you post stuff on HN, the visitors don't usually come in an orderly queue at the same rate for 24 hours. There is most likely a spike where most of the visitors open the site within a couple of hours, and then click around the other parts of the site. It can get pretty taxing pretty fast if you are serving for example images, and each page view triggers database queries.