Title: Studying the impact of being on Hacker News first page | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 27 July 2021 | |
Tags: networking openbsd blog | |
Description: | |
# Introduction | |
Since beginning of 2021, my blog has been popular a few times on the | |
website Hacker News and it draws a lot of traffic. This is a report of | |
the traffic generated by Hacker News because I found this topic quite | |
interesting. | |
Hacker News website: a portal where people give interesting URL and members can… | |
# Data | |
From data gathered from the http server access logs, my blog has an | |
average of 1200 visitors and 1100 hits every day. | |
The blog was featured on hacker news: 16th February, 10th May, 7th July | |
and 24th July. On the following diagram, you can see each spike being | |
an appearance on hacker news. | |
What's really interesting, is the different between 24th July and the | |
other spikes, only 24th July appearance made up to the front page of | |
hacker news. That day, the server received 36 000 visitors and 132 000 | |
hits and it continued the next date at a slower rate but still a lot | |
more noticeable than other spikes. | |
Visitors/Hits of the blog (generated using goaccess) | |
The following diagram comes from the tool pfstat, gathering data from | |
the OpenBSD firewall to produce images. We can see the firewall is | |
usually at a rate of ~35 new TCP states per seconds, on 24th July, it | |
drastically increased very fast to 230 states per second for at least | |
12h and the load continued for days compared to the usual traffic. | |
Firewall states per second | |
# Conclusion | |
I don't have much more data than this, but it's already interesting to | |
see the insane traffic drag and audience that Hacker News can generate. | |
Having a static website and enough bandwidth didn't made it hard to | |
absorb the load, but if you have a dynamic website running code, you | |
could be worried to be featured on Hacker News which would certainly | |
trigger a denial of service. | |
Wikipedia article on the "Slashdot effect" explaining this phenomena |