Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch

First off, best of luck with your project. Secondly, kudos on writing the post-mortem, as I know it takes some guts to own a "failure".

I think, however, the need to write something like this speaks to an incorrection assumption: you need a "launch". Of course, TC and HN can give you a nice bump in traffic and even signups. However, in the long run, this really doesn't accomplish much for you. It gives you the kind of traffic that will likely leave and move on to the next article, skewing your metrics. There's certainly qualified prospects in there, but it's hard to decipher with all the noise.

Again, the concept of a "launch" speaks to poor business models. It really benefits businesses where the word "traction" is more important than "revenue". Build a business that provides a service that others will pay for and grow as fast as the business can bear, bringing in those visitors that are truly valuable to you.

Running with swap enabled is a terrible idea. The authors mention how it was only once solr crashed that they were able to actually log in and start fixing problems; having swap means that rather than the OOM killer terminating processes, instead your whole system just grinds to a halt.

(it's strange that they recommend enabling swap when they also recommend enabling reboot-on-oom, which is pretty much the complete opposite philosophy)

1. So nginx didn't cache because of cookie?

2. Isn't swapping bad? I don't think I've ever had a situation in which swap more than say 100MB was helpful. Once the machine starts swapping, a bigger swap just prolongs the agony.

3. If you couldn't ssh, why didn't you just reboot the machine?

Edit:

1. What did you use for the graphs?

2. What is the stack?

Cucumbertown co-founder here. Nginx was serving the cache and our sense was it was caching. But then the day before we put in csrf validation to the login form and it was bypassing the caching.

So in theory we were positioned to serve from Nginx cache.

Couldn't disagree more. HN community is the most (brutally) honest and it's feedback can prove very valuable - regardless whether HNers are the target market or not.