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What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

blog.freshdesk.com

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Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#21

Post by hallmark »

girishm wrote: post #17
orijing wrote: post #12

I'm curious: What impact did that have on your servers/infrastructure? Do you use some sort of elastic resource like EC2? Do you manage your own server? How did the server handle the load? Thanks a lot for the information, and congratulations on your product :)

Our website is hosted on Linode with nginx and our blog is on posterous. The infrastructure was rock solid. Nothing gave us any scares.

To keep things in perspective - mainly so that the original commenter doesn't draw the wrong conclusions - most of the pageviews (28,876) occurred on the hosted blog, which is served by Posterous and not Freshdesk's Linode machine.

The other 10,000 or so pageviews presumably hit their Linode machine over the course of a day or two. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. On average, that gives their site 8 or more seconds to serve a single request. If your site cannot respond in 8 seconds, you will have trouble servicing any level of traffic.

This isn't comparable to being Slashdotted or TechCrunched. No need for elastic cloud servers in this case.

Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#22

Post by michaelochurch »

I had about 20,000 in one day. I don't know what rank I held because I wasn't aware that I'd made HN until 12 hours later.

To that point, my blog had been getting 25 to 50 views a day. I hadn't even turned off moderation. Big mistake. I got 60+ comments in that time. It would have been so much better if people could have seen each other's comments, some of which were very good.

My 15 minutes is over and now I'm back down to about 100 views per day.

Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#24

Post by _pdeschen »

orijing wrote: post #12

I'm curious: What impact did that have on your servers/infrastructure? Do you use some sort of elastic resource like EC2? Do you manage your own server? How did the server handle the load? Thanks a lot for the information, and congratulations on your product :)

I had a blog story running on the front of HN for a couple of hours and my EC2 micro instance just died under the load. Since I didn't expected to have such amount of traffic in the first place, my WordPress installation wasn't optimized at all.

I have learn in the process and now I think my blog can handle way more rps even on a micro instance. Thanks to nginx. I have blogged about this a couple weeks ago:

http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/wordpress-need-for-speed-o...

One of the next step would be to use nginx load balancing (upstreaming) feature but I bet I won't get that popular :-)

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