21–30 of 107 posts
Your project, Cucumbertown, is a cooking/recipe site/platform/network. Hacker News is not your audience/customer. Any "launch" on Hacker News is a fail, regardless of downtime.
Your project, Cucumbertown, is a cooking/recipe site/platform/network. Hacker News is not your audience/customer. Any "launch" on Hacker News is a fail, regardless of downtime.
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 o…
When we did the beta, I posted the launch details on HN and you’ll be surprised by the amount of constructive feedback and users that we got. Cucumbertown now has users from devs to CEO’s who came in through HN and are now engaged users. Cucumbertown has some notions like 'forking recipes' – called “Write a variation” which enables you to take a recipe and fork and make changes. Additionally Cucumbertown has a short…
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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.
Ah, always the kicker... small changes with a big and unseen impact.
If anyone owns a blog or site that they suspect may appear on HackerNews (especially if you're posting it), then please take the small amount of time to put an instance of Varnish in front of the site. Then, ensure that Varnish is actually caching every element of the page, and that you are seeing the cache being hit consistently. You should expect over 10,000 unique visitors within 24 hours, with most coming in the…
A few weeks ago I got on the front page and within a 24 hour period was hit with 29,000 unique visitors with 38,000 page views. The page itself is image heavy with 1.3 MB on first load. I'm running Wordpress with the Quick Cache plugin by PriMoThemes. I'm hosted on a shared 1and1 server.
I've been hit before and went down, that's when I installed the Quick Cache plugin. Also 1and1 moved me to another server at some point but I'm not sure if it was before or after. Either the cache plugin is really good or I'm on a rockin server all by my lonesome. Or both.
If you're self hosting a wordpress site grab the Hyper Cache plugin or the very very simple Quick Cache plugin by PriMoThemes.
http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web-tutorials/wordpress-c...
It doesn take more then an hour, and you quickly know what your upper limits are, and where the bottlenecks are.
I use gatling in favor of JMeter: https://github.com/excilys/gatling
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When we did the beta, I posted the launch details on HN and you’ll be surprised by the amount of constructive feedback and users that we got. Cucumbertown now has users from devs to CEO’s who came in through HN and are now engaged users. Cucumbertown has some notions like 'forking recipes' – called “Write a variation” which enables you to take a recipe and fork and make changes. Additionally Cucumbertown has a short…
Wow, forking and shorthand are great features! I had no idea from your homepage. Maybe I'm not your target audience but you should make that clearer the moment someone lands on your homepage. ("Why we're different and maybe better than AllRecipes or XYZ: ...")
Cucumbertown is very UX focused and from our research we came to a conclusion that our “aha” moment is to get you to the fastest possible way to write a recipe and give you that bout of joy. Now being hackers, we’d want to see forking & stenography in front of us. But that’s been a struggle we’ve been trying to showcase between simplicity to the “aha” moment and differentiation with others. Our primary audience comes to Cucumbertown because they are frustrated writing recipes in dropbox, google docs, wordpress & tumblr blogs as “blobs of text”.
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 o…
When we did the beta, I posted the launch details on HN and you’ll be surprised by the amount of constructive feedback and users that we got. Cucumbertown now has users from devs to CEO’s who came in through HN and are now engaged users. Cucumbertown has some notions like 'forking recipes' – called “Write a variation” which enables you to take a recipe and fork and make changes. Additionally Cucumbertown has a short…
This is probably my favorite feature: http://www.cucumbertown.com/tribe/ (Jane Jojo's really flying ahead)
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The blog mentions that they did have caching on with nginx (which is what Varnish does, isn't it?). The problems were because of nginx not caching the frontpage (configuration issue) and because there was an unexpected hit on solr.
The unexpected hit was just users using the full text search, right? That probably should have been one of the first things tested as I assume that would be a bottleneck in speed in all stages of development...or at least it has been in my experience. I often try to think of ways to not have full text search...this case is a little more difficult, but why not create a list of common recipe names (i.e. "grilled cheese…
In our defense this page was supposed to be HTTP cached and that didn’t happen which led to this domino effect.
Obviously, it's easy to say that when you're on the bench. Congratulations on the launch by the way.