I wrote a blog post that generated a lot of traffic on HackerNews last year when it briefly was on #1 here. My blog was (and still is) hosted on a 9-year old Dell Latitude E7250 with Intel Core i5-6300U processor. The server held up fine with ~350 concurrent readers at its peak. It was actually my fiber router that had trouble keeping up. But even though things got a bit slow, it held up fine, without Cloudflare or anything fancy.
Computers are stupid good at serving files over http.
I’ve served (much) greater-than-HN traffic from a machine probably weaker than that mini. A good bit of it dynamic. You just gotta let actual web servers (apache2 in that case) serve real files as much as possible, and use memory cache to keep db load under control.
I’m not even that good. Sites fall over largely because nobody even tried to make them efficient.
I’m reminded of a site I was called in to help rescue during the pandemic. It was a site that was getting a lot higher traffic (maybe 2-3x) than they were used to, a Rails app on Heroku. These guys were forced to upgrade to the highest postgres that Heroku offered - which was either $5k or $10k a month, I forget - for not that many concurrent users. Turns out that just hitting a random piece of content page (a GET) triggered so many writes that it was just overwhelming the DB when they got that much traffic. They were smart developers too, just nobody ever told them that a very cacheable GET on a resource shouldn’t have blocking activities other than what’s needed, or trigger any high-priority DB writes.
In the US, it’s not about money or demand. The more entrenched cities (especially in California, for some historic reasons/legislation) tend to have a much more difficult time getting fiber installed. It all comes down to bureaucracy and NIMBYism.
SF is mostly served by AT&T, who abandoned any pretense of upgrading their decrepit copper 20 years ago, and Comcast, whose motto is “whatcha gonna do, go get DSL?”
AT&T has put fiber out in little patches, but only in deals with a guaranteed immediate ROI, so it would mean brand new buildings, where they know everyone will sign up, or deals like my old apartment, where they got their service included in the HOA fee, so 100% adoption rate guaranteed! AT&T loves not competing for business.
Sure, others have been able to painstakingly roll out fiber in some places, but it costs millions of dollars to string fiber on each street and to get it to buildings.
Lived in an older neighborhood in Georgia a couple years back. A new neighborhood across the street had it (AT&T), but we didn't.
Caught an AT&T tech in the field one day, and he claimed that if 8 (or 10—memory's a little fuzzy) people in the neighborhood requested it, they'd bring it in.
I never did test it, but thought it interesting that they'd do it for that low a number. Of course, it may have been because it was already in the area.
Still, may be worth the ask for those who don't already have it.
we have fiber in half of SF via Sonic - where there are overhead wires. The other half of SF has its utilities underground making economics more difficult.
