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We almost had a similar experience with our front-page HN post here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25314170

Except we were not prepared for the traffic, and it took the site down for over 24 hours! Lesson learned...

On my bucket list is using the "Referer" header to aggressively redirect traffic from hug-of-death websites toward cached pages.

It's been a long time since I've worked somewhere that would benefit from that trick, so I haven't had a chance to use it.

That post got just over 100 points - very curious to know roughly what kind of traffic you say from it?

Perhaps it was a slow day if 100 points isn't considered that many - I think the high traffic was from being on the front page!

I wish I could quantify the traffic, but it really did wipe out the server, preventing everyone (including myself) from accessing it! I couldn't even remote in to shutdown/reboot.

The last number I had was just as things were grinding to a halt. It was just over 350 "realtime" users according to google analytics!

Hehe, I didn't mean to say 100 points wasn't a lot, only that it was fairly "standard" for being on the front page, and would make for an interesting metric.

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