I hope to once make the frontpage on HN. Not for the fame or anything, just to check how scalable my blog really is. :)

Do you know of any way of testing your website to see how many concurrent users it can handle?

Siege [0], is my go-to. Easy to add to CI, because its on most platforms, and has decent output configs. You can vary headers and pages to hit, and how long connections get held open, or just reject them. And of course, it has great concurrency.

It can bring down most servers that aren't configured to prevent DOS attacks, like naive nginx or Apache configs. Usually somewhere between 5-10mins.

[0] https://www.joedog.org/siege-home/

Check out something like locust[0]. It's a web load testing framework in python.

[0]:http://locust.io/

http://locust.io/ for example

a long long long time ago (~2009) i used jmeter. it spawns aws instances and pegs your website in ways of your choosing. by now I am sure they got something even more advanced

When I was on the front page of HN, IIRC it meant about 5k visits in an hour. How can such a low number kill a webpage... Or do other on the front page experience much higher traffic?

I also got to the front page and saw similar, low numbers that were trivial to handle. I suspect they can get much higher.

I doubt they are higher judging by the number of comments and votes.