Re:Making a site that can handle #1 on Hacker News
by tahoecoder on Monday April 29, 2013 @01:27AM
(#5624239)
Lots of people are misunderstanding that chartbeat figure. It's not 287 visits in a 45 minute window. These are visitors who are currently interacting with your site. Some are idle but most aren't.
Re:Making a site that can handle #1 on Hacker News
by saurik on Monday April 29, 2013 @01:35AM
(#5624262)
Can you give us a more useful understanding of how many pageviews your site actually had? You only have three webpages. If we assume that for each visit the user visited all three of them and then further reloaded your home page twenty times, that's still fewer than one pageview per second.
As you had a spike to 282 concurrent visitors (four times your average), even under that unrealistic amount of reloading, that's less than four requests per second. (Again, really: one way to look at that figure is "in a 45 minute window"; I provide the broken-out math below to make it clearer.)
To amplify your comment, processors today process billions of instructions per second. Even if all 3000 pageviews _did_ hit within one minute, thats hundreds of millions of instructions available per pageview. His pages just aren't complex enough to require that many instructions to serve.
tahoecoder's image to "prove" his load indicates he had 287 visits within a 45 minute window. Allowing hundreds of _billions_ of instructions per page served. Please do give me a break.
At Quantcast we handle 800,000 HTTP requests per second, and process 30 petabytes a day, so it really is possible to handle actual high loads.