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Old server: two Xeon E5450 chips, 3.0 GHz, 8 cores total, 24 GB RAM.

New server: one Xeon E5-2690 chip, 2.9 GHz, 8 cores total, 32 GB RAM.

Wow, nice, that was exactly the HW I was predicting; the fastest single-core-performance xeon under turboboost.

I don't know whether things have changed since, but some time ago (a year or more?), IIRC pg mentioned that the site was running on a single core. (I don't recall his saying what type of core.)

P.S. I see that abstractbill beat me to it, both in stating here and in originally acquiring this information:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229548

Around 40-60 requests per second, of which almost anything an be cached. Any single server should suffice.

But you would need at least 30 Heroku dynos to handle that reliably ;)