The Top 5 Problems With Having a Hit On HackerNews

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17 points·samh··6 comments

The same holds for reddit#programming. My blog analytics in month view are now almost useless: usually 100 pageviews-a-day, and have two or three peaks of 2000-4000 from hn/proggit. Not like I didn't enjoy it, mind you :)

Yep :) I just go to traffic sources and limit it to search engines - unpaid. That's what I'm mainly interested in, my organic search traffic growth.

Speaking of this, what's a reasonable number of requests per second an application should be able to handle before it's safe to post it on HN (or Reddit?). I've got an application almost ready that I'd like to post for comments, but I'm a bit concerned that the machine it is on might buckle under the load.

I'm not sure... From my past experiences if you post an item that hangs on the front page for around 15 hours you will get around 3000 visits.

That order of magnitude is my experience. Google for "the hackernews effect". I know Justin Vincent from the techzing podcast (great podcast) has posted numbers from when his web app Pluggio (formerly tweetminer) was on Hacker News, so you could search for that.

I've had the same experience of around 3000-4000 visits for 14-20 hours. The problem may be that it is concentrated in a pike or maybe 700 in ~30 minutes I think.

If you use mixpanel, you can turn off particular items on your graph, which makes the scale usable again.

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