Edit° (~1 hour later): So I've been checking every few minutes, and it's consistently been at ~450, this is a cool metric to have.
°This link was posted to HN ~4 hours ago. I first checked ~1.5 hours after it'd been posted, and it was #1 on the front page. It's still #1 as of this edit. The counter has consistently been between 445 and 455 the whole time.
The application has retained a 3 day uptime. But I don't think the 450 number is entirely true with Nginx causing an artifical cap on it. Would probably be higher if I didn't hit that limit. Drats, upped the limit, hope it recovers.
Edit: #4, post is six hours old, counter up to ~190.
Edit: #5, ~6 hours, 173 points, ~220 current site readers.
Edit: Back to #4, ~6 hours, 186 points, ~300 site readers.
Edit: #12, ~11 hours, 276 points, ~445 readers
> So now we know that a #1 post on HN has about ~450 concurrent visitors
I thought you were trying to get a measure of traffic to HN. In that case, the number of visitors to the site is only an approximation. But if you were talking about how much traffic HN directs to the #1 post, then the number is exactly correct.
Indeed I was :)