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Comment by Harkins | Hacker News Reader

Lobsters sysop here - we're having trouble keeping up with YC News's level of traffic. We're not going to crash, but the unicorn worker pool is small enough that lots of users are getting 500s. I'm adding some caching.

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Actually more interested in how you're handling this than the PC fight that's breaking out around the thread.

I'm not sure what you're asking for. If it helps, https://lobste.rs/about has some notes on the community and https://lobste.rs/moderations has the log of moderator actions.

Pretty sure this meant the technical details of dealing with the increased traffic of the HN hug-of-death, rather than moderating policies.

The "PC" made me think he was talking about political discussion, but I added some caching in https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/commit/e99c0783aa386740... and I'm thinking https://github.com/rails/actionpack-page_caching would be good for logged-out users.

How much is the traffic? Yc traffic is not really that high

SQL isn't a good match for the recursive structure of comments (and our version of mariadb from LTS Ubuntu doesn't support recursive common table expressions), so the app pulls all comments in ActiveRecord objects and threads/sorts them there. It's expensive and uncached. Codebase is here if you're curious: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

Traffic counting has to wait until I have spare attention, which is also a shallow resource pool. :)

Great answer, thank you.

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