| Even caching is normally unnecessary. Honestly, HN front page traffic isn’t much. For most, it probably peaks at about one page load¹ per second², and if your web server software can’t cope with that, it’s bad. Even if your site uses PHP and MySQL and queries the database to handle every request, hopefully static resources bypass all that and are served straight from disk. CPU and memory usage will be negligible, and a 100Mbps uplink will handle it all easily. So then, hopefully you’re only left with one request that’s actually doing database work, and if it can’t answer in one whole, entire second, it’s bad. (I’m talking about general web pages here, not web apps, which have a somewhat different balance; but still for most things HN traffic shouldn’t cause a sweat, even if you’ve completely ignored caching.) Seriously, a not-too-awful WordPress installation on a Raspberry Pi could probably cope with HN traffic. —⁂— ¹ Note this metric: page loads, not requests. Requests per second will scale with first-party requests per page. ² From a quick search, two sources from this year: https://marcotm.com/articles/stats-of-being-on-the-hacker-ne..., https://harrisonbroadbent.com/blog/hacker-news-traffic-spike.... Both use JS tracking, but even doubling the number to generously account for we sensible people who use content blockers has the hourly average under one load per second. |
Well then sites on average are sadly "bad" by your standards. Lots of sites that get on the front page of HN go down.