

How to prevent my site from getting crashed by HN? - Xcelerate

I am going to make a submission to HN next week with a website I have created.  I have a suspicion that it will be fairly popular (but I could be completely wrong here).  In the event that it is, what sort of traffic should I expect to be able to handle?<p>If someone on here has submitted something to HN before and it was top 5 on news page, how many visits did you get and in what time period?  Even an order of magnitude guess is helpful.<p>Also, I designed my site in NodeJS.  Does anyone know a good service I could put it on that could manage high traffic for 2-3 days?  I have a Nodester account but that site is always crashing (and it's slow).  I also have the free tier of Amazon EC2.  Thoughts?<p>Thanks!
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factorialboy
* Serve static content statically i.e. use Nginx or node-static or preferably a CDN.

* Cluster your processes to make the most of CPUs

* Try Joyent cloud or AWS.

* If what ereckers says (10K visits) it's really not a big deal. You can run stress tests to verify.

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koopajah
You can find a lot of discussion on HN where people hitting frontpage for a
few hours (or more) go into details on the number of visitors they had and
other statistics.

Examples:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4230885>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3933016>

[http://blog.elastic.io/post/22253468976/featured-on-
hackerne...](http://blog.elastic.io/post/22253468976/featured-on-hackernews-
and-betalist-comparison-and)

Hope this helps

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polyfractal
I had an article sit on the frontpage over the weekend about two weeks ago.
Total traffic was around 18k, peaking at 140 uniques/second.

This was a WordPress blog, so I had it configured to use W3 Total Cache, AWS
Cloudfront as my CDN, nginx as my webserver, APC for php opcode caching.

My current box is a pretty beefy dedicated, but I used to run the exact same
config on a 512mb Linode instance. It handled front-pageing just fine (similar
traffic stats).

Basically, cache everything you can, look up performance tuning guides for
your webserver, disable keep alive.

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ereckers
You might want to search the site foe expected traffic levels. If memory
serves me right I think front page is good for about 10k visits.

As for withstanding the hit, with your config, I can't help.

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dangrossman
I've had a front-paged node.js app behind nginx. It was running on the
smallest Linode instance. There were no issues managing the traffic.

