But it's impossible not to gloat at least a little bit about someone lecturing us about low level efficiencies from a site that can't manage to serve static blog content to a few hundred visitors a minute (or whatever it is that the top slot on HN drives these days).
If my blog is unreadable for five minutes a month, I am perfectly happy and I'm not going to change anything.
I wouldn't dream of keeping a blog that couldn't handle a HN traffic spike. That's the whole point of having a blog.
Failing at this is like launching your startup's MVP to an audience of the first fifty people who were able to load your product launch page before it crashed under the load. In other words, a giant, easily-avoidable waste of effort.
It seems possible that some people don't care that much about HN traffic spikes.
"The ratio of bytes loaded to load time should be very close to the I/O throughput of the machine."
How do you think the bytes served for a few hundred requests a minute compares to the theoretical I/O throughput of the relevant machines?
And because no one can see my tongue in my cheek across the internet, I'll be explicit that I'm sure he is a user of his publishing environment, not it's author, and so it's fair to view this as just another symptom of the problem he's discussing.