This is off topic, but is the traffic from HN really that great?
It seems like websites are dead pretty often on HN, but on sites like Reddit where I assume there is a magnitude more traffic they seem to hold up pretty well (with some exceptions).
So what's going on here? Does HN really have a bunch of silent viewers? Or is it something more benign like sites that get submitted are often smaller?
When I posted a recent high ranking blog post[0], I received around 18,000 views over the next 24 hours according to Google Analytics. I don't believe this covers a lot of the bots and associated traffic that also crawled the site.
This amount is nothing for a Jekyll site, I had CPU hovering at around 4%, with a series of services also running on this server. This is, imo, where a "hug of death" should end.
I did however at the time, have several colleagues in web development express shock and awe at the fact the site stayed online with traffic levels such as this. Multiple people tried to school me on the need for Cloudflare at this incredible scale.
A lot of web developers think about "scale" in terms of many bloated CMS platforms, and it is with no surprise that the site in question is running Wordpress.
We had a friend's site a while back where we worked out, with just two desktops and spamming "F5" on the keyboard, we could take the site offline, and take several minutes to recover from after the fact. He went and posted for help on Reddit, and sure enough, the consensus was that his experience involved far more traffic than any website could reasonably be expected to handle.
Your answer therefore lies not in the silent HN users, but in the unusually poor performance of popular CMSs. And although I'm using Wordpress, it's not alone in this situation.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973181
See I understand the reasoning behind it, but I don't think that's it alone.
I'm saying that the frequency I see the "HN hug of death" is much more than the "Reddit hug of death" while having many of the same kinds of sites (the "bloated CMS platforms" you talk about).
> This is off topic, but is the traffic from HN really that great?
Hmm I wonder if there are any good traffic statistics. I had a library (msngr.js) hit the front page once over a year or so ago and while it helped me gain a bunch of GitHub stars looking at the traffic itself it wasn't really much at all. In fact it was significantly less than I would have expected. Granted maybe my library just wasn't that interesting to people but I would love to see somewhere with some good HN numbers.
I think the biggest factor here is the HN front page is the same for everyone, Reddit’s often depends on what subreddit’s you subscribe to (AFAIK).
+ Most of my time on Reddit is specific (small-ish) subreddits, vs. HN where you can basically just look at the front page.
I guess, but I've had a site I own get to the front page of a default sub on reddit, and it's impressive to say the least.
With the multiple-magnitude less comments and votes that HN submissions get, I can't imagine they can get anywhere near that unless HN has a LOT more non-contributing types.
Dynamically generated sites are a Bad Idea when they can be trivially statically generated.
A lot of people still think using WordPress or even Rails for site generation is fine, but both are hard to scale. And if the site is small or academic, it will fall over with not too much traffic.
I wrote a rant [1] about this a couple of weeks ago. I can guarantee that my site will never have a "Database Connection Failed" error (now), because there's no database backing it.
Even better would be if I moved hosting to S3/CloudFront. Dirt cheap, and Amazon isn't going to fall over even if a site hits Reddit's front page. I might not like the bill I get at the end of the month if it really goes crazy, though.
I actually heard of the /. hug of death first, (and your comment feels a little condescending there) and I know of them, but it just feels like HN is such a smaller community compared to Reddit and I see the "hug of death" so much more frequently on HN than I do on reddit (or any other site like them).
I was just curious about the reason why. Like does HN have a large "silent" group, or is it something like that on HN sites climb much faster so I see them when they are down before they've had a chance to recover.
It seems like websites are dead pretty often on HN, but on sites like Reddit where I assume there is a magnitude more traffic they seem to hold up pretty well (with some exceptions).
So what's going on here? Does HN really have a bunch of silent viewers? Or is it something more benign like sites that get submitted are often smaller?