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Comment by mashmac2 | Hacker News Reader

"Our Page Load Speed Is Up Fog Creek" And How HN Has A Slashdot Effect

The cause was... wait for it... Apache KeepAlive. For more details, searchyc.com for [patio11 keepalive]. It kills more blogs than cancer.

I should start a How To Make Sure Your Blog Does Not Die Horribly consulting business. And it will consist of disabling Apache KeepAlive, and then chanting arcane incantations in Latin about caching for the next hour to make people feel like they were really getting their money's worth.

Have another upvote. I still use apache as a front end and hadn't seen this yet either.

...or just don't use apache unless you have a specific need otherwise. NginX handles tons and tons of alive but idle connections gracefully, and will still be snappier for users that want additional pages.

I first learned to disable Apache KeepAlives in 1998. Yes, 1998. It's disheartening that Apache still ships with it enabled by default. It has always allowed a relatively small number of lingering clients to completely DoS your server.

Yup, looks like Wordpress just fell over. Restarting...

What caching plugin do you use?

I think its WP Super Cache

Have you looked into W3 Total Cache? I've heard it's quite a bit better at handling heavy traffic. I've never gotten enough hits to see, but it's worth testing.

We believe the problem is actually Keep-Alives on Apache plus the cache. Keep-alives are now off. Cache on. Everything seems peachy.

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