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Comment by taminka | Hacker News Reader

how does that happen btw? like it's understandable when a website is hosted on a vape (lol), but even a cheap vps should be able to handle like 10-20k views in the span of a couple hours (which is the max load from HN i'm assuming), unless you're hosting video or some such

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It depends! You can make a website with a static text file or you can make a video run as the background. There are more ways to mess it up than to get it right, actually.

> how does that happen btw?

People write their sites in slow languages "because it's I/O bound anyway" and put content which could easily be static in a DB.

A slow DB. If you were to use Redis as a backing store…

Then you’d almost certainly be overcomplicating things, but it shouldn’t be slow.

Slow? But this site should have been written in just html and CSS

I should clarified in my original message. The shop page was hugged.

I'm doing a bit of WordPress work lately, and the whole server freezes while it responds to a single HTTP request for several seconds. If you open a bunch of links in new tabs, you can watch them load one by one, for the next 20-30 seconds.

Serve even statical pages with direct DB access on every hit, using some slow and bloated JS/Python backend, and voila.

I use a blog that does three 'direct' (do you mean synchronous?) database queries for every pageview. Language was PHP5 (I feel like 7 got a lot faster but didn't do benchmarks so idk). Standard WAMP stack, renders in about 35 milliseconds on 2001 (sic) hardware iirc, and the HN homepage is very comfortably under 10 requests per second, so it's idling most of the time.

Database queries and interpreted languages aren't an issue at all. You need to be majorly unprepared to not be able to handle HN load. What I think people might overlook is that there will be other news outlets and social media that link to their website also. So it's hard to pass a verdict, though someone mentioned it's WordPress in a sibling comment so... I'd put my money on that it's poorly optimised but we can't really know I guess

Static sites are not that popular, generally speaking.

Anyone competent can put a static site up on CF pages or even a lame VPS and serve huge amounts of traffic just fine. That’s not what they do.

One of my things was briefly on the front page, I got ~15k views in about 10 minutes. That was a few years ago, might be different now.

It's a WordPress site.

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