Hello, Hacker News Readers¶
The other day, a friend of mine brought this to my attention:
Somehow beating out anime catgirls? I can’t tell you how many people pointed that out.¶
This came as a bit of a surprise, since I’m not particularly active on Hacker News.
However, I understand it’s obligatory that when this kind of thing happens, one makes a post like this to explore the effects on an otherwise pretty obscure web site. So here we are.
For the last few years, my traffic has been pretty stable.
The plurality of that traffic (17% of hosts) is due to Cisco[1] using the rsa calculator in some of their learning materials. Second place (10% of hosts) is the hangman solver, which was briefly[2] so popular that it was a source of income.
However, on August 21st, we spiked up from the normal background level of 1-5 thousand visitors per day to a bit over 50,000.
Talk about swamping.¶
Here’s what that looks like for a shorter window.
Those graphs were generated by goaccess.
A different web log analysis package makes slightly less pretty graphs, but includes an hourly usage chart. Here’s one for just the hits referred by news.ycombinator.com:
The top of that Y axis is 5,299 total hits in hour 9. The times shown here are all in UTC.¶
That makes it pretty clear when things started and how quickly they dropped off. It also has country data. Webalizer makes a 3-D pie chart out of the countries, which I won’t inflict on you, but here’s the table:
# |
Hits |
Country |
|---|---|---|
1 |
10054 (30.07%) |
United States |
2 |
3222 (9.64%) |
Germany |
3 |
2825 (8.45%) |
Great Britain (UK) |
4 |
1450 (4.34%) |
France |
5 |
1394 (4.17%) |
Netherlands |
6 |
1297 (3.88%) |
Canada |
7 |
927 (2.77%) |
Australia |
8 |
919 (2.75%) |
Sweden |
9 |
806 (2.41%) |
Switzerland |
10 |
776 (2.32%) |
Poland |
11 |
701 (2.10%) |
India |
12 |
664 (1.99%) |
Spain |
13 |
569 (1.70%) |
Italy |
14 |
513 (1.53%) |
Finland |
15 |
494 (1.48%) |
Norway |
16 |
448 (1.34%) |
Denmark |
17 |
425 (1.27%) |
Austria |
18 |
366 (1.09%) |
Brazil |
19 |
319 (0.95%) |
Belgium |
20 |
296 (0.89%) |
Japan |
21 |
285 (0.85%) |
Portugal |
22 |
263 (0.79%) |
Ireland |
23 |
248 (0.74%) |
Czech Republic |
24 |
196 (0.59%) |
Turkey |
25 |
194 (0.58%) |
Singapore |
26 |
193 (0.58%) |
Israel |
27 |
188 (0.56%) |
Russian Federation |
28 |
176 (0.53%) |
Romania |
29 |
172 (0.51%) |
New Zealand |
30 |
162 (0.48%) |
Hungary |
This is still just hits referred by HN, as of today. Interesting that the US is less than a third. I would have expected more. It looks like the peak was around midnight on the west coast, which also surprises me a little.
All in all, though, this didn’t do much to my server. The post is currently sitting below 500 points with 56 comments.
The thing I’m really curious about is how csense found this blog in the first place. Maybe I should look through the logs and figure out how they found me.
…
That was easy. The first hit in August on the d4d4 post was on August 17th at 15:39:08 UTC. This came from an IP address that had been looking around other parts of my site, running Firefox on Linux, sent to the Zig pointers page by duckduckgo. Funny.
One more thing: I named this post after the slashdot effect, but I hear that these days it’s called the hug of death. This is a static site with no fancy database queries or anything going on behind the scenes. Here’s the CPU load graph from the time in question:
Topped out at almost 8% load. Bandwidth looks like this:
4 Mbps is low enough that residential DSL could have handled it. It would seem that the front page on Hacker News just doesn’t generate all that much traffic.
Footnotes