tahoecoder

Go to French Pass on the northern tip of the south island. It's a beautiful and remote spot.

Creating a daily average of concurrent visits isn't relevant. Servers don't take an average of all the possible future hours of complete inactivity when they are serving up requests.

The post was only up at the top for a couple of hours before the server performance got so bad such that everyone started flagging it. My post then dropped off the front page and quickly went to page 4 or 5 due to the flagging.

I agree with you that the more interesting number would be the the concurrent number of requests.

Lots of people are misunderstanding that chartbeat figure. It's not 287 visits in a 45 minute window. These are visitors who are currently interacting with your site. Some are idle but most aren't.

Knowing how many people are on your pages at any one time isn't a meaningless number. You're right in the sense that it's not a great way to assess quantitative site load. I just used that number in the blog to give a qualitative assessment of how many people were currently on my site.

Also, you are misunderstanding this chartbeat number. These 282 visitors weren't spread out over 45 minutes. These are real time users. Granted, some users are idle but most are interacting with the pages.

If this blog post were about the specifics of server load from a #1 HN post, I wouldn't even use the chartbeat figure. The post was about middleman + s3 + cloudfront. The chartbeat figure was more than enough to give readers a qualitative glance of how many people were looking at my site.

Not sure why I have to defend the number. I think any #1 post would see 287 concurrents. http://imgur.com/yfn9Dnd (look at the 30 day max). I was a little off, it was 282 concurrents.

My main site, AppRaptor, isn't on octopress. Just this blog. I agree with you 100% that the problem was apache + mod_php. Nginx would have probably been better. I decided to try out this s3 + cloudfront solution instead, though. I'll take a look at nanoc. Thanks for the info.

Fair enough. I think we are all sick of hearing about WP Supercache.

My post was about middleman + s3 + cloudfront, however. I think this combination of tools isn't as well known and some people could benefit from knowing about them.

A lot of people on HN are still learning things like this. I understand that a post like this doesn't add any value to someone like you who probably knows this stuff inside and out, but I'm grateful for posts that give me insight into new tools that can help me. This isn't just a community for people with 10 years of programming experience.

Should I not try to help out the community with blog posts about my experience? Should we just cater to the experts?

Must be your internet. My server load time is hanging steady at 455 ms.

The issue is a static site shouldn't even need to use caching techniques.

When I'm building an app I will use memcached with redis. But this post was just about getting a host environment/workflow for situations in which you want the ease of development that server side languages provide (shared code includes, etc.) and not have to deal with things like caching.

Fixed those errors. Thanks.

I did make a lot of changes suggested. I changed my about page a lot, and made copy changes to much of the stuff on the homepage. Keep in mind that this site is still a work in progress and I got caught up with other stuff the rest of the week. I will probably make more of the HN suggested changes later. I'm just saying that not all recommendations fit in with the author's view on something.

Also, it's unreasonable to expect the author to make every change which is recommended. Some things are judgement calls. I really appreciated the feedback of HN and acted on most things suggested, but not everything.

I beg to differ. I changed a lot of stuff which was recommended by HN. What errors do you see? The main thing I didn't change was I kept the open source stuff highlighted because the vast majority of people visiting the site will want to find those resources.

My site made it to #1 on hacker news last wednesday for a couple of hours. It peaked at 287 concurrents. Unfortunately, I wasn't expecting that kind of surge and only had it on a small linode, so it couldn't handle the traffic. Since then, I've moved it to an S3 bucket with cloudfront as a cdn. http://www.appraptor.com

Thanks for the link. That was a really useful article for me.

Thanks for those resources. Didn't know about them and they look really useful.

It's not a wordpress site.

Yeah, I supposed more people would just be interested in the free stuff so I made it easier for them to find it. My rationale was if somebody liked my work then they wouldn't mind searching a bit more for the hire me link. Perhaps I should switch them, though. It is a business after all.

Excellent points. I've mainly been working remotely, but I am also willing to travel to the bay area to visit clients (might even move there soon). I will make some changes to that page to include my skype contact as well.

Yeah, good call. I wasn't expecting this kind of surge so I didn't plan ahead.

Thanks for the firefox heads up. I'll look into that. I'm embarrassed about the grammar issues. Two people have now commented about that. I have been writing a lot of the copy late at night. (part of me was expecting nobody to actually see the site for a while, too. A "launch" of a consulting site is usually 10-15 visits, in my mind)

I prefer developing in ruby/rails. I just put this site up on my small linode because I didn't need to do anything dynamic with it. The linode was already configured for PHP so I was lazy and just went with that. Might move it to Heroku after this and perhaps change it to a small sinatra site.

Yeah, sorry. In retrospect I should have put this site up on heroku.

Thanks for the well thought out feedback. Good call on making the "hire me" the focus in the nav. I'll make those changes. Sorry for the performance right now.

I have my gmail address and cell number up there as well. Guess I should make them more prominent.

Sorry for the slow load times. I put this site on a small linode and wasn't expecting this kind of surge. Trying to optimize apache right now.

Do you need to upload a resume for this to work? I signed up a while back but didn't hear anything from them.

You, apparently, aren't getting a whole facebook feed full of baby photos. It gets old fast. People really embrace this whole "circle of life" motif.

You should speed up the rate a bit when going to mars, and just tell the user that the velocity is higher now. It takes up too much of our time, to be honest.