I’d love to know more about what running a site like HN involves, would be great to get a write up of what it’s like running something like this at this scale (and what kind of traffic you guys get)!
I’d love to know more about what running a site like HN involves, would be great to get a write up of what it’s like running something like this at this scale (and what kind of traffic you guys get)!
I can’t put my finger on anything within the last decade, but I seem to recall it running in something close to its current form on a single core on a single server for a long time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522
Re: traffic, dang said (2022):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140
I took it as a good reminder that the hard part is the human part: that high-overhead features and UI fripperies are nice but not necessary (or sufficient) to keep a community healthy and vibrant over the decades.
(And on the subject of the human side, if you didn’t catch Anna Wiener’s 2019 profile, it’s here:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... )
From dang's 2022 comment about traffic:
The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it.
I find that surprising, as 2011-2022 covers an exponential rise in SEO spam and "growth hackers" attempting to drive traffic and links.
Or was 1,300 the number of non-flagged submissions?
Nope, total submissions. And it's still very much within that same window!
The other reality is that as much as this industry is up its ass about scalability you can run a very very busy site on a single machine now a days.
A lot of people out here designing their blogs like its 1989.
This is completely wrong, everyone knows you should rewrite everything in microservices immediately :-D