You should really consider moving this webpage and report to something like AWS S3 when you first release it. Then move back to your usual servers when traffic has fallen off. Your poor servers must melt down when this shows up on Hacker News and Slashdot.
Internally we're blaming our SEO people for putting to much crap on the blog itself ;) But yea, it's worth exploring - though we have our own servers that should be able to handle the load. We haven't had blog loading trouble in a while, so it'll be neat to debug this later :D
From the outside it looks like your running a fairly intensive Wordpress install on an Apache webserver with no page caching.
Also seems there's no minification or combining of stylesheets/js and there are query strings on those static assets which is going to discourage caching.
No wonder you need a datacenter to handle that kind of resource punishment!
There are plenty of reasons to stick with Wordpress in a decent sized corporation but if not switching to a static site at least stick W3TC on there so you're minimising your server load and serving out static html and minified/combined resources.
You could then consider using Varnish in front of Apache or maybe nginx with a FastCGI cache.
I"m sure you've got some folks in the team who could whip up a W3TC install in 10 minutes.
Because if it is it from the team that currently can't keep a blog post online when you get a few thousand concurrent visitors, so you might keep yourself open to suggestions and perhaps undertake the BASIC best practices of keeping a Wordpress site up under load.
If nothing else it shows a basic lack of planning for what you know to be a massively popular post, so turn a little of that judgement back on yourselves.
It's possible easily handle tens of millions of hits a day on a tiny VPS if you do even some basics right[1] and that was without any particularly extensive optimisation.
EDIT: I may not be allowed to reply to the comment below due to HackerNews restrictions so incase the option doesn't become available in the next while I'll just say I accept the answer below gracefully, withdraw my daggers and take a calming beer at the end of a long day :-)
I'm wish you continued success and look forward to the next post.
No, he was agreeing. We have a lot of projects on our map to shore up some of these types of issues, but our admins are in high demand, so some of the lower-priority tasks slip on occasion. Since we rarely have issues with the blog (today was an exception) it tends to be a "we know what we'd like to change, but we'll do it when we have time" type of silo on our website.
*Edit -> to your above edit -> I think if you expand the comment by hitting the "time submitted" link you can leave a reply, thus subverting HN :P
I'd suggest switching to a static site in general. I have no idea what kind of traffic they're sustaining at the moment but NGINX serving up static html (or s3) is a lot more efficient than Wordpress or another blog engine consuming cpu cycles.
I don't get it either. Free Trade has improved the lives of billions of people. It helps prevent wars and binds people and countries together. I just don't get the Hacker News Hate on Free Trade.
I support free trade, but I am strongly opposed to TPP. In the past 10 years we've seen many attempts at faux-free-trade agreements... corrupting deals negotiated in secrecy, intentionally hidden from pubic checks / balances, supporting big corporate interests and oligopolies.
That is not free trade.
When it comes to TPP in particular, I am radically opposed to their proposed IP laws. EFF has a short write up on how TPP undermines with digital IP: https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
As an Australian, I loathe the TPP, negotiated in secret, where US IP laws can invade our own; pharma companies can jack up the prices on medication; and foreign companies that don't even have a presence here can sue our government and hold them to ransom.
Most importantly, it's not a "free trade deal". It's just a "trade deal". Australia's trade deals in the past with the US have done things like removed tariffs for all US goods coming here, but not removed tariffs the other way around. We're definitely the little brother in this relationship.
Zappa is a Python tool that can be extremely helpful for persons getting into Lambda. It basically handles everything except for code creation (You have to do that). You can make crontab like jobs or a website and then push the code up to Lamba with a single command. It handles all the temporary S3 buckets, IAM account creation, fetching the Lambda URL, uploading code and connecting Lambda to API Gateway. Deployments are super smooth.
pip install zappa
It supports all of the Languages for Lambda, not just Python.
That reward is bullshit. Their requirements are so strict that no one could defeat it. If they did that same challenge in Iran, Iran would win the challenge and the reward.
> Plus, getting a copy of all your contacts is and invasion of privacy for an app that is advocating for privacy and security.
You really need to do research into this before making this claim. The phone numbers are hashed (Or something like it) before being sent to the Signal servers.
Unfortunately, hashing provides no meaningful protection here. The preimage space (i.e. the set of all possible phone numbers) is just too small. See https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/
That's a pretty good idea. I've had a few people ask over the years how it's done, and I uploaded the original source code a few years ago. Although I could probably fix up the site faster than I could properly move it over to Github...
> But democracy doesn't mean they can vote to force other countries to forgive their debts.
Bingo! Greece can do whatever it wants. If they want to stay in the Euro, then they can stay in the Euro but have to follow certain guidelines. If they want to do what they want to do then they can leave the Euro, but they should not complain when their overspending ways catch up to them and it all falls apart.
I have to disagree with the author. I have setup Wordpress using OpsWorks and it is a much better way to do this especially considering all of the stack can be auto managed via Chef. Updates are handled automatically and if you get a surge of traffic, autoscale kicks in.
The only issue is getting the plugins to auto update on all of the servers, which I am fairly certain you can do with Chef or WordPress just handles it.
