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Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

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Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#41

Post by jackowayed »

markbao wrote: post #34
jackowayed wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than get another Linode, for the very short term, I'd just crank the current Linode as big as they go (I assume Linode has super-quick resizing) and tell passenger to run a bunch more processes.

Just cranked it to 2048MB. Cranked Passenger to 55 workers in the pool. Using 400% CPU still. Linode's probably not happy. EDIT: Cranked to 4096

I doubt they're unhappy. Resources are shared in such a way that everyone is guaranteed their fair share. I think the 400% reflects that you have access to multiple cores. 100%=maxing out one core, I believe. (And you might not be truly maxing it out, just maxing out your share of it.)

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#42

Post by latch »

kabuks wrote: post #14

Your site seems to be down. Think about moving the code over to Heroku now, and keep scaling to meet demand. If you don't have the cash, email me and I'll front you what you need to keep it up until you figure out how you want to roll with this. This is not a time to trip over pennies. Congratulations.

Might not be a time to trip over pennies, but there's also no reason to rush into things. Heroku has always seemed to be horribly overpriced as a scaling solution.

A more traditional approach of 1 web and 1 db server (possibly even physical boxes) might end up providing better value and give him enough time to figure out how to scale this horizontally on EC2 (the web part should be easy...remove any in memory state data, the db might be a bit more work).

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#43

Post by mickdarling »

Hey Mark, it's been a while. Nicely done. You said it was just an MVP so I assume you have a product designed beyond this point. So, NOW is the time to do some validation on what those other ideas are. You have a large audience who already know who you are and are willingly giving you input.

Maybe in put down your follow ideas in short little phrases and have people provide three words on that, if they wish, along with three words on their friends. It will give you great insight into what THIS audience thinks is a good or bad next step for you.

This is a site that will not maintain interest as it is beyond a short period unless you add more to it. So the key here is to move forward quickly, even if it is in tiny incremental steps. letting the users help you make some of those choices of what steps to take can only help.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#44

Post by markbao »

rapind wrote: post #40

The following until you no longer have issues handling the traffic (which might be right after step 2). 1. Upgrade your linode to something around 2 Gig for now. 2. Start playing with your MySQL or Postgresql config (assuming you're not already using redis or something similar, in which case just throw more RAM at the box). Google performance settings for your DB of choice and look for relevant posts to the memory yo…

Upgrading to the 4 gig linode as we speak. this is getting kind of ridiculous.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#45

Post by rapind »

markbao wrote: post #44
rapind wrote: post #40

The following until you no longer have issues handling the traffic (which might be right after step 2). 1. Upgrade your linode to something around 2 Gig for now. 2. Start playing with your MySQL or Postgresql config (assuming you're not already using redis or something similar, in which case just throw more RAM at the box). Google performance settings for your DB of choice and look for relevant posts to the memory yo…

Upgrading to the 4 gig linode as we speak. this is getting kind of ridiculous.

The linode guys are great. You might want to flip them an email and let them know you're getting hit. Could speed up the resizing etc.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#46

Post by phlux »

Skywing wrote: post #3

Well, it's a nifty idea and I know I've seen that trend on Facebook before. But that's also the problem - it's a 1 time use fad type thing. I don't know how much I'd invest in the current incarnation - perhaps just enough to keep the site functioning. Aim for some kind of traffic-based business strategy like ads or something. Maybe it can help pay for the site itself. If you could perhaps take the current idea and ev…

let the words become tags linked to the FB account. Such that if users have a tag like "Snowboarder" associated with their FB account - he can build out a tagDB of FB accounts.

This way - you could target ads to FB accounts/users that are all "snowboarders"

Or you can at least search who among your friends have the tag [snowboarder].

Or if you give more categories to the tags, you can ask your friends to fill in their favorite 3 [X] -- so you can simply ask all your friends a question and then build an interesting DB of tags/info/interests of all FB users.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#47

Post by jasonlbaptiste »

jacquesm wrote: post #31

hey Mark, if you need server capacity I can set you up with four machines on very short notice, let me know. j@ww.com (no charge, help you handle the spike and see if it has staying power without having to get in to long term contracts).

^ This is reason why I love this place and never believe the occasional "hacker news is going to shit" posts.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#48

Post by anthony_franco »

markbao wrote: post #23
anthony_franco wrote: post #12

What's your main bottleneck? What's driving that high CPU? Without knowing more about your setup I'd offload assets to S3 and switch from Passenger to Unicorn.

User-specific assets are on S3... will need to offset the javascript and CSS there too. Good tip on Unicorn. Any benchmarks on the performance gain over Passenger+REE?

Not sure if there's any benchmarks out there. But I had your similar setup when my app went viral. Switching to Unicorn w/REE replaced an expensive engineyard setup. Learned about it from github (https://github.com/blog/517-unicorn)

But something you could do immediately to help with the load is to run haproxy on your current linode and funnel some of the traffic to a new linode that you spin up.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#49

Post by [deleted] »

klbarry wrote: post #39
gdeglin wrote: post #11

I recently built a Facebook application that approached the same kind of growth. Sites like this typically see eCPM between $0.10 and $0.30 for advertising. So you're looking at around $30/day revenue right now. Consider switching to EC2. This will allow you to easily scale up to a more powerful server if growth continues or down to a less powerful one if traffic tapers off. Depending on how you set things up, a comm…

Would it be possible to see your Facebook app? I'm curious to see what traits these fast growing apps have in common in person.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#50

Post by phlux »

jeromec wrote: post #24

No offense, but putting it on HN in the middle of traffic spike pressures would not help things. ;) I was able to sign up and see just enough to get a feel before the site became unresponsive. I like that it's dead simple. I can also see how it's incredibly viral as it asks you to ask others to describe you -- very smart. At first glance it looks to me like something that could enjoy tons of traffic, but which would…

>>Next, I would try to become known as the place to get a quick summary on anybody -- even celebrities.

You mean like About.me is attempting to do? This is an interesting twist though...

However - the quick summary I look for on anyone of interest (professionally) is linkedin.

I do not and shall not have a facebook account.

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