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Why are "thousands" of requests noticable in any way? Webservers are so powerful nowadays.

Small, cheap VPSs that are ideal for running a small niche-interest blog or forum will easily fall over if they suddenly get thousands of requests in a short time.

Look at how many sites still get "HN hugged" (formerly known as "slashdotted").

I remember my first project posted to HN was hosted on a router with 32MB of RAM and a puny MIPS CPU; despite hitting the front page, it did not crash.

At this point, I have to assume that most software is too inefficient to be exposed to the Internet, and that becomes obvious with any real load.

While true, it's also true that it was (presumably) able to run and serve its intended audience until the scrapers came along.

It's not just one scraper.

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