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Comment by johnrdavisjr | Hacker News Reader

I can only view the cached version. Looks like he needs a mirror.

Or he needs to implement caching on his Wordpress site.

Almost every day there's a popular blog post that misses a large portion of its audience because the author wasn't caching. You'd think that more authors would plan for a traffic spike from aggregators, since that's sort of the holy grail of blogging.

It's hard to plan for a problem you've never had before. Most people expect it's just going to work.

Or that their host can handle the stress.

In the same vein as caching (and why caching is good) but the less DB activity each page request can generate, the better. Shared hosts seem to be very conservative with how many concurrent DB connections are allowed to be open at any one time, HostGator's limit is I believe 25. But persistent connections are usually available; PHP has mysql_pconnect and mysqli_connect('p:' . $host).

I've always had a lot of issues with mysql_pconnect in PHP. Hung connections, connection reuse causing data corruption, and various other random issues.

Generally using just mysql_connect is faster than using mysql_pconnect. On the server I admin for a large website with millions of hits a day we don't use mysql_pconnect.

> that's sort of the holy grail of blogging.

eh, I've lived through several spikes in the 6 years I've been blogging - the real holy grail is watching your search engine traffic increase bit by bit, month on month. I've been on digg's frontpage (back in 2007ish), linked to from xkcd's blog, I had a 20000 visit spike from reddit just this week. The spikes are fun, but they fade away after 2 or 3 days. The xkcd traffic lasted longer but that's because Randall didn't update his blog for weeks after the update that linked me.

But yes - even so, it's not nice to have your site die in the middle of a huge spike. It's just possible that that's the day Larry Page would have decided to tweet about you.

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