[lucb1e]

> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).

The page is like 30KB + that 3 MB image. The avg ~two hits per second that you get from a HN top position iirc (this is fairly old data though) is 6MB/s for a few hours, say 6 hours, that's 130GB. Unless it's hosted via a wireless uplink (4g/satellite/..), I don't think there's an ISP in the world that cares about using 130GB extra during a random month. Even in Belgium I think the caps were around twice that ten years ago

[trillic]

cloudflare is caching the image:

    ```
    accept-ranges: bytes
    age: 5397
    alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
    cache-control: max-age=14400
    cf-cache-status: HIT
    content-length: 3013598
    content-type: application/octet-stream
    date: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 23:14:32 GMT
    last-modified: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:44:35 GMT
    server: cloudflare
    vary: accept-encoding

    ```

[pdntspa]

wait, top billings on HN brings in 2 hits/sec of traffic? That is an unbelievably low number considering how many sites fall over under that pressure

[lucb1e]

Exactly. I think this shows two things quite nicely:

- Very few sites need to cope with more than a handful of hits per second. A regular DSL connection and desktop PC can host the vast majority of them; you don't need clouds if you don't want them. (Even under variable load: if you need 80% of the systems more than 40% of the time, scaling down is probably not worth the cloud premium)

- If a site can't handle HN, that's a software limitation. Compare Wordpress' insanely slow page generation to simple blog software that generates pages in 5 milliseconds, or even to hosting the blog as static HTML files. I'd not be surprised if you can serve Wikipedia's page text from like one Raspberry Pi 5 per country. Not that you'd want to do that for reliability and redundancy reasons, plus you have the constant stream of edits to process and templates to (re-)render. Media and blob hosting is also a separate beast. Thankfully, most sites are not in the top ten world's most popular websites and you get away with a lot

[smt88]

WordPress is a static host for the vast majority of users. The generation time is irrelevant. Almost by default, it will just cache the rendered page and always serve from the cache.

[troupo]

At one point I had two pages in the top spot on HN: https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114852056319245427

- 20k peak unique visitors

- 162k peak requests

- 56 GB peak data but most of that data was cached by Cloudflare

[lucb1e]

That peak is a 24-hour cumulative value if I'm seeing it right?

[eterm]

Do you have stats for the peak requests / second?

[troupo]

Sadly, no :(

I'm currently on free cloudflare plan, and I don't think it shows rps. And it doesn't show stats more than 30 days back

[Retr0id]

Closer to 10 at peaks, but a lot of sites are just fragile.