I know I sound like a complete d--k, but my laptop from 2012 has eight cores that each run over 3 billion cycles a second. How do < 2000 comments make your servers more than blink? I'm guessing you have more than one server?
I get frustrated by sites not accepting HN's "hug of death". An now HN can't even stand its own hug...
Anyway, thanks for getting things running again! You guys are awesome!
Believe me, we hate slow software at least as much as you do and have put a lot of effort into addressing this. HN is a lot faster than it used to be on median load. It still falls short on excessive load. We'll get there!
Well, then. That is rather impressive.
(Though I suggest adding a processor/server. Probably small compared to your existing Cloudflare costs.)
If you have questions about using this, please feel free to email me about it.
Either way, it's not just down to the number of comments on a thread, as you imply, clearly the number of requests for that page plays a part. I'm guessing HN has been getting a huge amount of traffic, probably way more than your laptop could serve dynamic pages at.
It could be, but that would add a JavaScript dependency that HN currently doesn't have.
Said so... 2k comments, uncached render for logged in users and no pagination are a very low bar in 2016, especially for a YCombinator website.
edit: saw dang's comment below and wanted to make sure this doesn't come through as harsh :)