Is Your Site Hacker News Ready? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

#41

Post by eli » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 4:03 PM UTC

fekberg wrote: post #35

First time I reached the front page I had ~250 concurrent users and increasing, then the server crashed. After that I wrote a cronjob that runs a script which automatically increases my virtual machines RAM. When I have little or no visits it uses 1GB RAM the most it went up to was 9GB RAM (increasing with 1GB at a time). It also sends me an e-mail when increasing/decreasing the RAM so I can ensure that it doesn't cr…

Which provider is that? AWS? I feel like it's only a matter of time before auto-scaling works well enough that it's just a standard feature.

Re: Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

#42

Post by dangoldin » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 4:04 PM UTC

Osmium wrote: post #38

steveklabnik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-programmers find it much easier to log into a site, type in a text box, and click 'submit' than to run some sort of static site generator.

If you're at the stage where you're maintaining your own server anyway, it doesn't seem like too much to ask. Static websites are glorious. Much more secure, much faster to load, far fewer things that can go wrong. Cheaper, too, since they require fewer resources. And, as luck would have it, there's a perfect Hacker News thread to get one started: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857473

To add to that. You can add a whole lot these days via Javascript. You want to get some comments? Just embed a Disqus widget. Want some feedback? Embed a getsatisfaction widget.

Re: Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

#43

Post by krapp » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 4:05 PM UTC

kens wrote: post #40

Tip: if you have an image-heavy blog, don't host the images somewhere that charges extra for exceeding a network traffic limit. Getting an overage charge email was how I discovered that my fractal article full of pictures was on HN. As an aside, I found that being on Reddit can give much, much more traffic than HN.

I'd also like to suggest, as a matter of politeness, don't just hotlink to images on other people's sites either. Then you're just screwing someone else over. I'm still getting requests for an image I posted to an old wordpress blog years ago because random j. user liked it and reposted it to a forum. It's a popular forum, judging from my logs.

Re: Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

#44

Post by steveklabnik » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 4:07 PM UTC

Osmium wrote: post #38

steveklabnik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-programmers find it much easier to log into a site, type in a text box, and click 'submit' than to run some sort of static site generator.

If you're at the stage where you're maintaining your own server anyway, it doesn't seem like too much to ask. Static websites are glorious. Much more secure, much faster to load, far fewer things that can go wrong. Cheaper, too, since they require fewer resources. And, as luck would have it, there's a perfect Hacker News thread to get one started: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857473

I agree, but we weren't talking about maintaining your own server, just static languages and blog platforms.

I use Jekyll/Octopress all the time, I totally agree, static sites are great. But non-programmers are never going to use it.

Re: Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

#45

Post by robin_reala » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 4:11 PM UTC

We had a blog article on the front page of HN recently ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5133906 ) and I can’t say we had much trouble. Pushed the Heroku dynos up to two for an evening then dropped them back down to one at the end of the day. The site assets are hosted on S3 and we didn’t have to touch that. Ended up with about 16k hits.

Re: Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

#46

Post by EwanToo » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 4:39 PM UTC

Udo wrote: post #39

EwanToo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just pop Varnish cache in front of Wordpress to do the same thing - any unauthenticated GET's will just hit Varnish, and come nowhere near Wordpress itself. That way you wouldn't need to worry about software updates.

Totally. I guess I could also use some advanced Nginx directive/plugin to do that. The hack is just something that occurred to me spontaneously, it took about 2 minutes to implement, and I didn't even have to install anything :)

You could give these 2 config files a try sometime:

https://github.com/ewanleith/Wordpress-Server-Configuration-... https://github.com/ewanleith/Wordpress-Server-Configuration-...

Basically they make nginx cache itself, which combined with this Wordpress plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nginx-champuru/

Makes things very minimal, no need for even a dedicated cache :)

Re: Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

#47

Post by lousy_sysadmin » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 4:41 PM UTC

I've read so many times on HN that people find it hard to scale WordPress. Really? Running WordPress on 128MB VPS and theoretically I can handle more than 250 request per second without problem[1]. Granted that number is just theoretical value but please, if you have gigabytes of RAM and your WordPress site fail after some hundreds of request per second, you certainly have done something terribly wrong. Especially for site with text and very few media content.

Forget any other setup you've ever used, go with this for high performance WordPress

1) Nginx [set so that request to static content to completely bypass PHP]

2) PHP-FPM

3) APC [Object & Database cache]

4) W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache

5) Varnish

There many other high performance WordPress setup you could find out there but in term of simplicity and manageability, this is the one I fancy most. The bottleneck in this setup is RAM, not PHP, WordPress or MySQL read/write operation as I've seen in many server setup.

Disclaimer : I run small operation of managed WordPress hosting called KittySensei[2]

[1] http://i.imgur.com/m0Dg9YR.png

[2] http://www.kittysensei.com

Re: Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

#48

Post by nthj » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 4:41 PM UTC

Osmium wrote: post #38

steveklabnik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-programmers find it much easier to log into a site, type in a text box, and click 'submit' than to run some sort of static site generator.

If you're at the stage where you're maintaining your own server anyway, it doesn't seem like too much to ask. Static websites are glorious. Much more secure, much faster to load, far fewer things that can go wrong. Cheaper, too, since they require fewer resources. And, as luck would have it, there's a perfect Hacker News thread to get one started: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4857473

Or, if you really want or need a dynamic website, throw CloudFront or similar in front of the site.

Then lock down your CMS at a secret, SSL-only URL.

It's about 2 lines of Ruby or PHP to ping CloudFront and request an invalidation when you change a page (which only happens rarely anyway.)

Secure, fast, dynamic, only goes down if CloudFront does.

Re: Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

#49

Post by jonascopenhagen » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 5:26 PM UTC

2.5 GB virtual server? You don't need that at all. I use shared hosting for my blog, and yet I survived several hours as #1 on the HN front page. The trick? Static HTML pages (made with a homemade PHP blog system, but I could just as easily have used one of the many static site generators).

Re: Is Your Site Hacker News Ready?

#50

Post by arikrak » Fri, Feb 08, 2013, 6:06 AM UTC

You can just use free services to host your wordpress blog without any trouble. Set it up on AppFog or OpenShift, use cloudflare too, and use a cache plugin if needed. I don't think any HN-effect could take that down.