Closer to 10 at peaks, but a lot of sites are just fragile.

Exactly. I think this shows two things quite nicely:

- Very few sites need to cope with more than a handful of hits per second. A regular DSL connection and desktop PC can host the vast majority of them; you don't need clouds if you don't want them. (Even under variable load: if you need 80% of the systems more than 40% of the time, scaling down is probably not worth the cloud premium)

- If a site can't handle HN, that's a software limitation. Compare Wordpress' insanely slow page generation to simple blog software that generates pages in 5 milliseconds, or even to hosting the blog as static HTML files. I'd not be surprised if you can serve Wikipedia's page text from like one Raspberry Pi 5 per country. Not that you'd want to do that for reliability and redundancy reasons, plus you have the constant stream of edits to process and templates to (re-)render. Media and blob hosting is also a separate beast. Thankfully, most sites are not in the top ten world's most popular websites and you get away with a lot

WordPress is a static host for the vast majority of users. The generation time is irrelevant. Almost by default, it will just cache the rendered page and always serve from the cache.

At one point I had two pages in the top spot on HN: https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114852056319245427

- 20k peak unique visitors

- 162k peak requests

- 56 GB peak data but most of that data was cached by Cloudflare

Do you have stats for the peak requests / second?

Sadly, no :(

I'm currently on free cloudflare plan, and I don't think it shows rps. And it doesn't show stats more than 30 days back

That peak is a 24-hour cumulative value if I'm seeing it right?