[internetter]

I think it's on a shoddy webserver and is already being hn'd. A refresh fixed it for me.

Certainly not confidence inspiring but from the pages I visited it seems to be an excellent aggregator. Short summary, long enough for me to gadge if I want to head to Wikipedia.

Thank god for that, was worried it was going to be another wiki that is essentially just an unmaintained Wikipedia fork slowly diverging away

[jokowueu]

How many users on HN are there that this keeps happening ?

A few hundred in a few minutes is enough to take down a website? I've noticed that this keeps happening .

[KronisLV]

One of my blog articles got on the front page of HN a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185971

In total, I saw roughly around 27'000 views (that entire day, load varied, too lazy to figure out the peak RPS value), which meant just short of 8 GB of data being transferred and in my case over 500'000 files being requested (given all of the CSS files, images, JavaScript etc.).

Now, the blog held out fine, because it was based on Grav, which means that it ends up being a bunch of flat files: https://getgrav.org/

It is especially interesting when you consider that I had capped the container that it was running in to 512M of RAM at max and also 0.75 CPU cores, just so it wouldn't slow down the entire node (can't really afford to have a separate server for it).

So in essence, I think that static files can be served really well with limited resources, but once you throw complicated PHP apps (think WordPress), insufficient caching and also database access (especially with any sub-optimally written code) as well as perhaps even something like mod_php instead of fpm, things can indeed go wrong.

I've seen enterprise projects struggle with 100 RPM due to exceedingly poorly written data fetching, N+1 problems and developers not knowing how to avoid running into issues like that or outright not caring because of the system being an internal one and the infrastructure having resources to waste.

In my case, even the cheap 100 Mbps link was enough to serve all of the requests with minimal impact (i think the longest page load was up to 4 seconds at peak load, most others were lower, less than 2 seconds).

[pc86]

If you're on a $2/mo shared host I'm sure 50 visits in a short enough period is enough to toast the server for a bit.

Front-page HN articles can result in tens of thousands of unique visits[0] and several hundred simultaneous users. It's not hard to see how 200-300 can throttle an otherwise unoptimized site.

[0] https://medium.com/@ketacode/the-impact-of-appearing-on-hns-...