I think it started falling over around 450. I've been getting 500 on my Nginx for workers, so I bumped that but the resulting Nginx restart killed the count and it is currently at 217 as it has recovered but I probably lost tons of idle tabs.

The application has retained a 3 day uptime. But I don't think the 450 number is entirely true with Nginx causing an artifical cap on it. Would probably be higher if I didn't hit that limit. Drats, upped the limit, hope it recovers.

When the Europeans are coming up for midday at least. I wonder how that number will change depending on who's up.

And... It crashed. Image is currently down.

The counter does go up and down a bit. I'll have to check the logs and see what that's about at some point. Mostly it comes back up on refresh.

This is pretty good considering most people will only stay on the links for a few seconds.

I had a top post a few years ago and I think in total I had around ~60k visitors over a couple days. Have a bunch of screenshots lying around somewhere for a blog post that I never ended up writing.

2 hours after your comment, at ~190 concurrent visitors. 4th in the HN top atm.

Update: now it's on #2, and it's hovering around 430

Update: #3 and ~130. Whoa, dramatic fall.

Edit: #4, post is six hours old, counter up to ~190.

Edit: #5, ~6 hours, 173 points, ~220 current site readers.

Edit: Back to #4, ~6 hours, 186 points, ~300 site readers.

Dramatic fall was Nginx config bump and restart. Lost all those sweet idlers I'm sure. Hopefully it can go higher now with some luck but we might be past the peak. Really curious how far it can manage.

Update: #4, ~8 hours, 218 points, ~380 readers

Update: #10, ~10 hours, 261 points, ~410 readers.

Edit: #12, ~11 hours, 276 points, ~445 readers

Update: #16, ~13 hours, 295 points, ~200 readers

Update: #43 (second page of HN), ~15 hours, 314 points, ~80 readers

You have to adjust this for people who read the comments but haven't clicked the link :P

They mean visitors to the link

How so?

Re-reading your comment, perhaps I misinterpreted it.

> So now we know that a #1 post on HN has about ~450 concurrent visitors

I thought you were trying to get a measure of traffic to HN. In that case, the number of visitors to the site is only an approximation. But if you were talking about how much traffic HN directs to the #1 post, then the number is exactly correct.

> But if you were talking about how much traffic HN directs to the #1 post, then the number is exactly correct.

Indeed I was :)