Good opening for a question: what kind of servers were you using and how much traffic did it take to give them problems? (In other words, what's the performance of react like on the server?)
gigabo's account has been rate limited, but he wants to say:
"Well... we made it through the first hour or so of HN traffic on a single t2.medium instance in ec2 before we started seeing errors. We're now on three m4.larges with good head room. Not too bad, I think?
We meant to get cloud front set up before we got this sort of traffic, but glad to be surprised with an early bump. :)"
This is me saying this: I think we are thoroughly over-provisioned now for the load we are seeing, but we wanted to avoid any more hiccups while you all are trying to check it out.
I honestly don't know, what's the actual requests/second for that?
I don't have a good feel for what HN traffic is like. From one post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107658), it seems like a few thousand hits/hour over a fraction of a day, but (1) there's a lot of variation, (2) it doesn't tell you the peak rate
We were seeing around 450 active users on the site at the peak. We currently have around 220 active users that are generating about two page views per second, peaking to six page views per second. That's about where we were when we scaled up from a single t2.medium instance.
Update on this: looking through metrics at the end of the day yesterday, we realized that the WebSocket-induced errors discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12271043 were having a much bigger operational impact than we initially thought. That's been dealt with and had a clear and immediate impact on the service health.
It would be nice to have another day of similarly high traffic to verify it, but I think most of our scaling up yesterday was to handle the WebSocket issue.
