[arghwhat]

It does handle many orders of magnitude more users than this thing does though. As a site that is the source of many hugs of death, it's serving a hell of a lot of traffic, mostly successfully.

It could serve even more traffic if it was less bloated of course.

EDIT: Some random stats from 2019 suggest that they're handling ~1000 pageviews a second on average over a month, and a view can take >100 requests to load. Combine with surge load and you're dealing with some serious requests per second.

[colejohnson66]

Over 100 requests per load? That has to be static files like images, right? Do they not have a cache system for that (like what Cloudflare provides)?

[spiralx]

Articles, thumbnails, comments, votes, awards, users, I'm sure it all adds up considering the dynamic nature of what each user sees. And they do do a lot of caching to make it work:

https://redditblog.com/2017/1/17/caching-at-reddit/

[MattGaiser]

A friend worked on a project that reached several hundred requests at one point.

Basically they had a 10 request component. Only one on the page so even though it wasn't that efficient, they didn't care.

But then their PM wanted 20 of them on a page. It was a Scrum team so velocity mattered, so they just had a for loop generate 20 of them.