[tfvlrue]

> the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop

You're not too far off :)

It's actually hosted on super cheap shared VPS with only 768MB of RAM and a single CPU core. This is the first time it's seen any real heavy traffic, and all considered I think it did pretty well with such limited resources.

I did a little postmortem investigation and, surprisingly, it wasn't CPU-bound. A low memory condition killed the database service a couple times. It looks like PHP-FPM was set to scale too aggressively. For the future I've reduced the number of workers it can spawn. Server administration is not my specialty, so this was a fun learning experience!

[lawrenceyan]

Wow! That’s efficiency right there. I’m pretty sure you can get a device with those specs for <$10 today.

Good job.