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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
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