Most likely the HN Hug of Death® had gone into effect. It's capable of incapacitating any sort of system without load balancing as soon as that system is linked from the front of Hacker News.
When did the Slashdot effect get renamed to Hug of Death? Anyway, 'tis broken for me too.
There must be quite a few hits on your website when HN links it. nginx out of the box can handle quite a lot of connections, assuming that it isn't trying serve something too complicated on each one.
I believe the phrase originated from Reddit many years ago, where the audience isn't fully familiar with the phrase's previous incarnation.
Since then it has been reappropriated widely on HN and Imgur and any place where people gather and unwittingly cause a denial of service with the best of intentions.
Thank you. I can't say I've been keeping up with my memes n that. The damn kids must have grown up or something!
I have to say, it is quite fun watching words, phrases and ideas being made up on the fly at a prolific rate these days. I can still remember reading about memes in a Richard Dawkins book and a few years later the concept was coerced wholesale by the internets. I still remember thinking "what the fuck is a roflcopter" and then suddenly achieving enlightenment. My granddaughters were born with thumbs that can doom scroll.
Nowadays are properly weird and will continue to get weirder. Despite that it will also continue to be normal.
HN itself runs on one average sized server. This looks like a blog serving static content which should never go down if you put something like CF in front of it.
If you’re just serving static HTML, HN should not be a problem. It’s only if you’re running code (and database queries) for every request that your server might go down in flames.
This might not work the same for a fresh port on an alternative system. For example: I have no idea how many open connections reactos could handle on the kernel-side with a standard config.
My blog was hugged once. Static webpage served with golang's net/http. Not more than 2% cpu load (single core), 20-30 requests/second. The problem was the default number of file descriptors. Once bumped that, all went well for the next few hours.
While the page was running on HTTPS, @timeoperator must have posted this (without me realizing it). Shortly after, the site was down due to the HN Hug of Death®. However, at the time, I thought it had something to do with my recent HTTPS change, so I rolled it back. As a result, the HTTPS link posted here stopped working.
In addition, I wanted to be smart and added a Strict-Transport-Security header:
So people who had accessed the HTTPS version (while it was active for a few hours) would never see the non-HTTPS version again.
I didn’t expect it to get so much attention, so next time I attempt something like this, I’ll perform proper load tests, have a dev deployment in place, and check access logs more often!
Try this: http://reactos.aaron.cc/