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There's no better stress test than Show HN, and unsurprisingly, that's revealed that Solar Witch has a buffer overrun bug somewhere which I'm investigating! If Solar Witch is currently offline, here's a screenshot of what it might look like: https://ttm.sh/ix3.png

discuss

smoe|3 years ago

I'm actually quite surprised and impressed that I was able to open the site and leave a message while this is on the frontpage!

lowercasename|3 years ago

I've been resetting it every 2 minutes! This is how regular servers work, right?

Aachen|3 years ago

HN may be a good stress test for Arduinos and WordPress, but it's really not that much load. I've recently had my site high on the front page and the page specifically recommended reloading if you didn't see the effect the first time. This is hosted on a ten year old laptop and a home Internet connection. The load average didn't budge.

People hugely overestimate the amount of firepower you need when you "go viral", presumably because more people read HN than post on HN so most will just never have tried, and even fewer people try without some preparation (you don't know for sure that it was unnecessary if nothing went wrong).

If one's pages don't require a lot of (pre)computation and you're not a huge destination on the web, things like load balancers, server clusters, etc. are a waste of time and money. But not using fancy tech is not what people here like to geek out on so...

jart|3 years ago

That's because people are so accustomed to leveraging mountains of free candy that they've forgotten that a web page can be served with less than 1000ms of cpu time. I got a job once when I told a story about a web app I wrote was going viral getting a million visitors a day while I was strolling in the park. The web servers I write only need a single system call (writev) to serve gzip encoded assets so wrk says they can do a million requests per second on one pc. So it's not like it was any kind of big technical achievement even though it was a technical job. My point is that we're drowning in so much software that sometimes being a master class engineer all it takes is not using it.

lowercasename|3 years ago

Well, granted, no doubt, but my poor little server routinely crashes after a few dozen connections, and exposing it to HN was the first time it experienced that many. Something is clearly amiss!

floren|3 years ago

Yeah my personal site is hosted on a very small VPS instance, has gone to the front of HN twice, and never really blinked.