| This actually says a lot about web technologies. 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 |
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).