[ttd]

I'm curious about this. If you have a purely static site, what would be the major bottleneck for a front-page-reaching site hosted on a raspberry pi? I'm thinking things like compression would eat up a lot of its CPU, but you seem to know more about this than me.

[mcbits]

A solid 3,000-word article with enough CSS to make the page look nice will fit comfortably in 20-30KB gzipped. A Raspberry Pi could handle on the order of tens of requests per second (tens of thousands per hour).

A fluffy 500-word Medium-style article with 1-2MB of JavaScript serving no apparent purpose and 5-10MB of animated GIFs would be another story.

[user5994461]

A realistic static site will have multiple css, a logo, potential images in the headers/footers/sides, links to the other top read articles with icons, pictures/schemas/drawing/photos in the content.

That sets any stupid article at a 500kB bar.

I have no doubt that a HN engineer can publish a single .txt file and force gzip-9 compression, however that's not an acceptable blog by any standard.

[user5994461]

> what would be the major bottleneck for a front-page-reaching site hosted on a raspberry pi?

For a fully static fully cachable site, it's the bandwidth.

Your home connection cannot serve Gigabytes of data in a timely fashion.

[jessaustin]

Can't compression be done ahead of time? ISTR it worked that way when serving content directly from S3, at one point...

[user5994461]

Last I checked, compression wasn't supported by all browsers all the time. It needs to be done dynamically depending on the settings the browser allows.

nginx or varnish can do that (with more or less correct rules).

In practise, I usually disable compression everywhere and let the CDN handles it.

The CDN is configured to compress on the fly and I am very confident that CloudFlare/Akamai are doing that much better than a broken snippet of nginx settings from stack overflow.

[jessaustin]

As one would expect, S3 can certainly support various browsers. It ends up being just like content negotiation, in that you have multiple representations that could be served from a particular resource, depending on what headers are sent.

I'm not sure if it's still like that, since I'm not using S3 for that right now.

[ttd]

I'm not an expert by any means, but I think you can manually gzip your content and add rewrite rules to Apache (don't know about other servers) to use the .gz versions. I think this is the only way for compressed content to be cached by Apache, but I'd love to learn if I'm wrong here.