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Comment by taviso | Hacker News Reader

welp, that's unfortunate indeed.

It's a single-core 128 MB VPS, which seemed fine for my boring static html articles. I guess I underestimated the interest.

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As an aside, I'd be curious to now how your VPS failed. Memory? Bandwidth?

I'm not really sure, cpu and bandwidth utilization were fine. Memory usage was high, but not oom high. It continued serving over http just fine, perhaps there was some automated rate limiting by my provider.

I'll have to debug when things cool down.

I'm aware 128M is ludicrous in 2023... "a fun challenge", I thought to myself. I can be a dummy.

FWIW, enabling gzip/zstd compression in your HTTP server could help.

A single core machine already overloaded is going to get even worse introducing the cpu overhead of gzipping response bodies (assuming it’s cpu bound and not IO bound)

Cache control headers will help with return traffic

More cpu cores

If using nginx ensure sendfile is enabled and workers are set to auto or tuned for your setup

Check ulimit file handle limits

Offload static assets to cdn

Since it’s a static html site, you could even host on s3, netlify, etc

Could even host on github pages with a cname.

It's a static file. You need to compress it only once, not for every response.

...and here's how to do it in Apache: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_deflate.html#preco...

> A single core machine already overloaded is going to get even worse introducing the cpu overhead of gzipping response bodies (assuming it’s cpu bound and not IO bound)

Unless your CPU is burning due to additional system calls being made.

Only with something like mod_asis (https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_asis.html) to serve already compressed content. Actually running zlib on every request will only make it worse.

> Actually running zlib on every request will only make it worse.

I wouldn't be so sure, given that without zlib HTTP connections take longer, thereby increasing the size of the wait queue and the number of parallel connections.

Doesn’t matter, great article!

Interesting, do you mind sharing what software you use to serve the static html and what kind of traffic its getting.

  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2023 17:05:06 GMT
  Server: Apache

I do not miss performance tuning apache.

In my personal experience, the first step in tuning Apache was "put a nginx server in front of it". Running out of workers (either processes in the prefork model, or threads otherwise) was in my experience way too easy, especially when keepalive is enabled (even a couple of seconds of keepalive can be painful). The async model used by nginx can handle a lot more connections before running out of resources.

Apache has been defaulting to event mpm for over a decade.

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