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Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

Oh, Well then let me share this.

A few weeks ago I got on the front page and within a 24 hour period was hit with 29,000 unique visitors with 38,000 page views. The page itself is image heavy with 1.3 MB on first load. I'm running Wordpress with the Quick Cache plugin by PriMoThemes. I'm hosted on a shared 1and1 server.

I've been hit before and went down, that's when I installed the Quick Cache plugin. Also 1and1 moved me to another server at some point but I'm not sure if it was before or after. Either the cache plugin is really good or I'm on a rockin server all by my lonesome. Or both.

If you're self hosting a wordpress site grab the Hyper Cache plugin or the very very simple Quick Cache plugin by PriMoThemes.

http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web-tutorials/wordpress-c...

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Thank you. This is pretty much exactly what I read the post for and was a little disappointed not to find. People talk about getting frontpaged on HN, Slashdot or Reddit, and how you need to be sure you can handle the load, but never give any useful figures on what that load is.

Knowing that I can serve 10 requests per second and likely withstand a frontpage on HN is more useful to me than knowing that I need a way out if and when my web-servers are being totally overwhelmed.

On an unexpected trip onto the front page, here's what I saw (hits at ~1 Hz on a Friday evening in the top slot):

http://measuredmass.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/hacker-news/

Graphical post-mortem here:

http://measuredmass.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/more-hn-numbers...

Agreed. I self-hosted a wordpress blog for a video-game fan site. I had a server status page that was a normal wordpress page that imported a file from the filesystem to embed in the middle (reported status of the game servers).

During some large events, I was seeing 5-7 page views per second and Wordpress did just fine (I think I had 120k page views in 24 hours). But I made sure to test as much of my site as possible to make sure it performed well. Using various page analyzers to make sure the proper headers were returned so objects were cached on the client. Tuning wordpress to cache pages properly. Turning on PHP APC (opcode cache). Running various stress tests on the site (apache benchmark and loadimpact).

I'd say the page analysis tools and extended apache-benchmark runs really helped me tune my OS and services properly so I could handle a huge load.

The standard WP caching plugin most people use is W3 Total Cache. It can require some effort to setup and get everything working but once done it will make orders of magnitude improvements to your performance.

WP Super Cache (using the htaccess option) got a client's site through 56,000 uniques / 78,000 page views on a HostGator VPS with 1.3GB RAM. The site unexpectedly got picked up by Japanese blogs as it was being taken live. Google Analytics showed up to 400 active visitors. Fun times.

AwStats screen shot: https://unavailable.s3.amazonaws.com/20121130_WP-Super-Cache...

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