Hacker News Reader

Comment by orijing | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious: What impact did that have on your servers/infrastructure? Do you use some sort of elastic resource like EC2? Do you manage your own server? How did the server handle the load?

Thanks a lot for the information, and congratulations on your product :)

View on HN

I had a blog story running on the front of HN for a couple of hours and my EC2 micro instance just died under the load. Since I didn't expected to have such amount of traffic in the first place, my WordPress installation wasn't optimized at all.

I have learn in the process and now I think my blog can handle way more rps even on a micro instance. Thanks to nginx. I have blogged about this a couple weeks ago:

http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/wordpress-need-for-speed-o...

One of the next step would be to use nginx load balancing (upstreaming) feature but I bet I won't get that popular :-)

Our website is hosted on Linode with nginx and our blog is on posterous. The infrastructure was rock solid. Nothing gave us any scares.

To keep things in perspective - mainly so that the original commenter doesn't draw the wrong conclusions - most of the pageviews (28,876) occurred on the hosted blog, which is served by Posterous and not Freshdesk's Linode machine.

The other 10,000 or so pageviews presumably hit their Linode machine over the course of a day or two. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. On average, that gives their site 8 or more seconds to serve a single request. If your site cannot respond in 8 seconds, you will have trouble servicing any level of traffic.

This isn't comparable to being Slashdotted or TechCrunched. No need for elastic cloud servers in this case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com