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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

your site is taking multiple seconds to load for me, depending on when I refresh.

Barely over a second here. Much better than vast majority of "webscale" services.

For sure, OP's site is handling this much better than most. And like I said, it's not every time that it takes multiple seconds. Some websites featured on HN/Reddit don't load at all when under load. However I was able to get it to take ~30s to load multiple times, over a period of around 10 minutes.

In their defence the sites that fail to load or take too long are usually full webapps that do a lot of work rather than just static sites.

The important message there is that if you can change your problem from serving slow dynamic content to serving static content you can gain enormous performance benefits.

Whether that means actually using static sites for stuff that can be static or just properly caching expensive things. Even dynamic content doesn't have to be slow, but many CMS are seriously inefficient without a cache. I'm not really blaming the CMSes entirely here, part of that is because they need to be extremely flexible, but once you need dozens of DB queries per page it'll fall over quickly on small hardware.

We're using Next.js at my current company with a custom MongoDB based CMS.

Next has a thing called Incremental Static Regeneration[0] which allows us to grab the top ~100 pages from the CMS at build time, generate the pages, then cache them for however long we want. The rest of the pages are grabbed when requested, then are cached for the same amount of time. After the time, they're re-grabbed from the DB, then re-cached. Overall I think we're down to around 5-10% of the way things were done before, which was -- you guessed it -- hit the DB on every page load _just in case_.

Sit the Next.js site behind CloudFlare, and then we also don't really pay data transfer costs. Our servers are just low-tier GKE nodes, and we run around 3k/visitors at any given time, sometimes spiking up to 8k concurrent.

[0] https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching#increme...

Even database queries aren't that slow on reasonable hardware, as long as the queries are simple. The problem appears once you have dozens of DB queries per page. It's really not a fair comparison to the site this topic is about, but for trivial queries you can easily get a few thousand requests per second out of Postgres on desktop hardware without any real tuning as long as the DB fits into memory.

But static content is of course still much faster and also much simpler.

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