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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Running a business means contact with people's opinions. Having your server fall over when you post it to Hacker News means contact with reality.

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Contact with paying customers, or eyeballs who refuse to pay is reality.

Contact with curious internet traffic crippling a non cloudflared webserver might not be.

Computers are fast now. You can serve five million hits a day with a webserver that's a shell script running from inetd. You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.

I don't understand such comments. Obviously the people having trouble serving HN traffic have no clue what inetd is. Most of them might not even know about using varnish/nginx and that too is fine. It is good that internet is so accessible that you don't need to write shell script from inetd to express your opinions on your own domain and website. A random php running blog will be able to serve far less than 5M hits/day and that too is fine. Most people can't run curlftpfs too and it turned out to be fine

Oh, I was using a shell script spawned from inetd as the lowest-tech, most primitive, worst-performance simple way of running a web server. A random PHP-running blog will easily handle tens of millions of hits a day unless you way overcomplicate it.

Millions of hits a day doesn't seem to be the correct metric for an HN front page traffic spike.

Concurrent connections per second is likely much more relevant, and in that case, one can put the most basic proxy or cache in front of the webpage to help a great deal, if not Cloudflare.

"Concurrent connections" and "connections per second" are two different measures which you are confusing. The second one is basically the same thing as "hits per day", and the first one isn't relevant.

I can't seem to reply to the other quote.

Concurrent connections is the number of simultaneous connections a server can handle, something little wordpress sites not behind anything to help often get slammed with on the regular.

Wordpress is kind of a pig, yeah. But unless you're running WebSocket or server-sent events or some other Comet thing from Wordpress, you can solve the concurrent-connections problem just by limiting the number of concurrent PHP processes your server runs (MaxRequestWorkers in Apache), which may or may not be set to a reasonable default like 20 normally. Additional burst clients will either pile up in the kernel's connection queue or have to retry their SYN packets if the kernel's connection queue is full.

The reason you need more than one concurrent connection (again, barring some kind of Comet) is that some clients take a significantly nonzero amount of time to finish receiving the response, at which point PHP has generally already finished executing but is still taking up RAM, which is what limits the number of concurrent connections you can handle with Wordpress. But really all you need to do is not go into swap when you hit an overload, and Bob's your uncle.

Depending on how it's configured, Wordpress may still not be able to answer new requests as soon as they come in, but that's not a problem of the number of concurrent connections; it's a problem of the number of hits per second.

You can decouple the number of concurrent connections from the amount of RAM you're burning in PHP by using FastCGI, or just plain old CGI, or nginx (with probably FastCGI), or putting a reverse proxy in front of Apache, or just about anything except mod_php, but you very rarely need to. There just aren't that many people on 14.4kbps modems any more, and your web server has literal gigabytes of RAM.

You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.

Wordpress sites served from a shared webhost get slammed by HN and go unresponsive all the time which can amount to a mini ddos.

Wordpress plugins can cache the site but really in 2025 it should be built in instead of the forced paid plugin route that has really made Wordpress a suboptimal experience.

And I don't understand your comment. The author is obviously a techie. Netlify + Cloudflare cost peanuts (might end up less than $5 a month) and you would have a blog that can sustain all but a coordinated huge DDoS attack.

If you're talking about non-tech people then sure but that would be a hypothetical. The author obviously has the skills. He just fell into the trap "my blog is not popular enough so WP is fine". Which is a common bug in our brain's algorithms: we never act until too late after an incident. Oh well. That's Homo Sapiens for you.

It can be a little myopic becuase it takes effort to understand teh experience of someone who doesn't have the same skills (technical) as you.

On one hand this is high praise for strangers assuming the best about them that they could learn.

Only, the vast majority don't know this, and even if they could learn, they aren't able to devote the time over years and decades to make it easy to learn, and if they can, they have other priorities that makes sure they won't be able to, or they choose not to.

I suppose one could argue that both are equally real.

I remember one time at summer camp in the teen dorm I claimed that pain was an illusion, because it was subjective. A girl named Lisa picked up a wooden block and threw it at me. It hit my lip, which started bleeding, and she was immediately horrified at what she had done; but I had to acknowledge that subjective "reality" has an importance to me that objective reality does not.

Interestingly I had just re-watched the House episode with the CIPA patient in S3, and it touched on this if you squint. The girl, having CIPA, effectively can’t feel pain. She can’t even feel getting 2nd degree burns and it’s questionable if she even felt them poking around in her head or if she used that to escape (and fall down a 2nd story balcony). The only time she felt actual pain was seeing her mother relapse and be wheeled off for more surgery.

She cannot feel what should objectively cause her pain, but because pain is a subjective experience she can’t. However, truly subjective pain, that is pain derived from emotional connection, is literally the worst pain she can feel.

This is a very deep story. Thank you.

I think you will like this Capgras Syndrome story.

https://youtu.be/dqBGzkz1oDU

The guy couldn't emotionally recognise his mother after seeing her and started calling her imposter. But when he heard her voice over telephone, he felt emotional connection and said the person on other end was indeed his mother. Emotional pathways provide salience information in conjunction with sensory pathways. Any disruption to emotional pathways can override even correct sensory data.

She objectively caused you to transition to an objective state which you both experienced subjectively!

Pain actually has a lot of objective parts to it. There are real chemical and mechanical processes involved. You could even argue the subjective part might be smaller than people think. Mindset can change the experience, but different people might just have different "pain functions" to begin with.

Same idea with hunger and weight gain or loss. Hunger is a biological process. You can push through it, but people also experience it differently because their actual hunger mechanisms differ, not just because they "interpret" it differently.

I don't care about the objective parts; the chemical and mechanical processes would have been exactly the same if it had been Lisa's lip that was bruised and bleeding instead of my own, or the lip of another boy halfway around the world, but it wouldn't have mattered to me in the same way.

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