How to prevent my site from getting crashed by HN? | Hacker News Reader

How to prevent my site from getting crashed by HN?

4 pointsXcelerate5 comments

I am going to make a submission to HN next week with a website I have created. I have a suspicion that it will be fairly popular (but I could be completely wrong here). In the event that it is, what sort of traffic should I expect to be able to handle?

If someone on here has submitted something to HN before and it was top 5 on news page, how many visits did you get and in what time period? Even an order of magnitude guess is helpful.

Also, I designed my site in NodeJS. Does anyone know a good service I could put it on that could manage high traffic for 2-3 days? I have a Nodester account but that site is always crashing (and it's slow). I also have the free tier of Amazon EC2. Thoughts?

Thanks!

View on HN

* Serve static content statically i.e. use Nginx or node-static or preferably a CDN.

* Cluster your processes to make the most of CPUs

* Try Joyent cloud or AWS.

* If what ereckers says (10K visits) it's really not a big deal. You can run stress tests to verify.

You can find a lot of discussion on HN where people hitting frontpage for a few hours (or more) go into details on the number of visitors they had and other statistics.

Examples:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4230885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3933016

http://blog.elastic.io/post/22253468976/featured-on-hackerne...

Hope this helps

I had an article sit on the frontpage over the weekend about two weeks ago. Total traffic was around 18k, peaking at 140 uniques/second.

This was a WordPress blog, so I had it configured to use W3 Total Cache, AWS Cloudfront as my CDN, nginx as my webserver, APC for php opcode caching.

My current box is a pretty beefy dedicated, but I used to run the exact same config on a 512mb Linode instance. It handled front-pageing just fine (similar traffic stats).

Basically, cache everything you can, look up performance tuning guides for your webserver, disable keep alive.

You might want to search the site foe expected traffic levels. If memory serves me right I think front page is good for about 10k visits.

As for withstanding the hit, with your config, I can't help.

I've had a front-paged node.js app behind nginx. It was running on the smallest Linode instance. There were no issues managing the traffic.

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