They could change the mediawiki config to use file cache ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgUseFileCache ) which is basically poor-man's version of varnish (it saves all the rendered pages on disk, and outputs that instead of rendering the page if you're not logged in or otherwise cant have a cached page). Would probably help a lot with the hn hug of death. Not sure if it would be enough, but it might be especially if combined with different max connection settings in the webserver to prevent memory starvation.

This is a larger ArchiveTeam problem, not a language problem. They use MediaWiki (Wikipedia) to effectively host static informational pages without a cache in front.

As the main sysadmin for the archive team's web frontend (this one happens to be hosted outside of my control) Yes, its mediawiki, no we cannot use fancy cache, JScott has a special deal with the web hoster that makes the hosting damn near bullet proof. on top of that, the overall group is anti-cloudflare. so we are kinda stuck with what Ive been able to meek out of a cpanel shared hosting plan.

There are a a number of open source friendly hosters that could probably host it for free. These ones come to mind:

https://osuosl.org/ https://www.fosshost.org/ http://www.gplhost.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/open-source/ https://www.gandi.net/en/gandi-supports

Oh it doesn't work like that. I direct you to the time he got sued for 1 billion dollars. These are "crackpots" that love to threaten our services. He gets crazy as shit takedown notices about once a week. that he promptly ignores

Send me an email (in my profile), I'll give you guys a server and capacity on my CDN.

Oh it doesn't work like that. I direct you to the time he got sued for 1 billion dollars. These are "crackpots" that love to threaten our services. He gets crazy as shit takedown notices about once a week. that he promptly ignores

Indeed. I hate PHP as much as the next dev, but Varnish and the like have been around for ages, and are easy to setup and operate. Dead simple, affordable solution for an essentially static site like this.

Tbf, the expected audience is small, its not like they are trying to sell something so its critical to stay up through some spike.

The architecture is totally fine for their use case. Arcitecturing it to stand up to hn hug of death would be over-engineering and not really make sense given their goals.

From the cached version:

> Hosting is provided gratis thanks to the kind folks at Tranquil Hosting

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make? If AWS gives $10,000 in cloud credits to a startup and their product goes down, it is AWS' fault?

Is that the file format problem? Are they being meta?

The solution is to not log warnings to the browser. It’s information leakage for no benefit, the users can’t fix this issue.

Problem solved if they used a static page here?

Guess the 'hug of death' has exhausted available memory for PHP to display the page.