Real-time heatmap example with Javascript and HTMLCanvas
patrick-wied.at
patrick-wied.at
It's a shame sites can't handle HN-level traffic automatically. My own site got borked when I put it on here without knowing much about web server configurations. Are there some standard practices which one should know?
Of course it depends on how intensive your app is, but for moderately loaded site - this combination is more than enough. For ex. I've tested Wordpress with this configuration - it can handle nearly 70 mil. hits per day (including into this number hits to images, so probably around 10 mil. actual visitors).
Wouldn't recommend for real-time upgrade (during spike). For real-time go for this: http://gist.github.com/638751 (if load average > 5 - sorry, exit). Crude, cruel, but helped me survive being unexpectedly TechCrunch'd on Apache (didn't know about nginx at the time), then you can finally edit your files, go for caching of nearly everything.
http://jlongster.com/media/static/stats.png
It's only a couple thousand. Maybe this link got passed around a lot more, but it's not too hard to scale up to several thousand.