[jacques_chester]

Without wanting to seem unnecessarily rude, it's not that hard to survive #1 at HN. I had a blog post submitted by someone else hit #1 for two days. It was worth about 25k visits. I've had other stuff do 100k visits in a day on the same system during a natural disaster; that little network is basically idling at what used to be vanity numbers (millions of views per month, guys, time to list on NASDAQ!)

If you're on Wordpress, install WP Supercache. That's 80% of the solution, right there. Install equivalent whole-page caching for any other framework or system and tell your HTTP server how to pick it up; that should leave you prepared for hundreds of RPS.

We're at the stage where people are posting the equivalent of "how I survived skipping lunch". It's not 1997 any more, tens of thousands of visits is a link from a moderately popular twitter account or a medium-size metropolitan newspaper.

I'm sorry to seem so uncharitable. I'm just not sure what value these posts add.

[tahoecoder]

A lot of people on HN are still learning things like this. I understand that a post like this doesn't add any value to someone like you who probably knows this stuff inside and out, but I'm grateful for posts that give me insight into new tools that can help me. This isn't just a community for people with 10 years of programming experience.

Should I not try to help out the community with blog posts about my experience? Should we just cater to the experts?

[jacques_chester]

I feel like we're going to sail off into old/new user debate territory. "It's been done before" / "I'm new and so it's novel to me" etc etc.

I'm not sure what to tell you, except I fall squarely on the "old" side of that divide, having had to nurse Wordpress installations for nigh on 10 years now.

But every time -- every time -- an uncached Wordpress blog is linked to and dies with the famously unhelpful "Error establishing a database connection", somebody pops up to mention WP Supercache and/or W3 Total Cache.

Actually, if I have a pet peeve, it's that non-terrible caching isn't part of the Wordpress core. Probably breaks on gawdawfulhost.com or something, god forbid that 99.999% of the internet be better off from core architectural improvements when we could be working on the fifteenth new admin redesign!!1!

Edit: I realise now that you weren't talking about Wordpress and thus, my own pet obsession is clearly revealed.

[tahoecoder]

Fair enough. I think we are all sick of hearing about WP Supercache.

My post was about middleman + s3 + cloudfront, however. I think this combination of tools isn't as well known and some people could benefit from knowing about them.

[jacques_chester]

In my opinion (given my superficial understanding of the prior situation), your problem was Apache + mod_php. The default settings for that combination are to chew memory until the bad people go away.

Out of curiousity, why middleman when you're already using Jekyll/Octopress?

(My dog in the static site generator fight is Nanoc, fwiw).

[tahoecoder]

My main site, AppRaptor, isn't on octopress. Just this blog. I agree with you 100% that the problem was apache + mod_php. Nginx would have probably been better. I decided to try out this s3 + cloudfront solution instead, though. I'll take a look at nanoc. Thanks for the info.

[jacques_chester]

Nanoc is hard to get used to but as far as I'm concerned it's a bucket filled with magic.