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Comment by user24 | Hacker News Reader

> Low Bandwith Version of this site due to large amount of requests:

> Aufgrund unzumutbarer Kosten und Bezugsbedingungen hat das Direktorium des Zentrums Mathematik beschlossen, alle abonnierten Elsevier-Zeitschriften ab 2013 abzubestellen.

> Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013.

> @http://news.ycombinator.com/ visitors: You just DDOS-ed our web server ;-)

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Somewhat odd that "Germany's leading Technical University" isn't able to handle a few Hackernews visitors showing up

I remember Reading HN now had a million accounts (btw can anyone confirm?)
if that's true then top story at the beginning of the US day could generate a lot of requests, and if the university has a plain cms that is updated once a week by the departmental secretary then it's pretty unlikely they have seen much traffic, ever.
To be honest I would be interested if pg could publish what kind of click through rate the various links generate - could even be a counter next to the story.

Last time when we were at the bottom of HN we got thousands of visits in very short time. I could imagine being at the top is very heavy on bandwidth.

I've had a Site survive the HN frontpage and a slashdotting on super-cheap shared hosting. But that was a few KB of text and two very small Images.

It's usually less of a bandwidth issue and more of a configuration problem - e.g. default Apache tries to spin up some 50 processes to handle requests, which can drive a small server into swap space.

In this case the 50 worker processes started by apache were just not enough to handle all requests. Each page hit creates about 30 requests for html,js,css,png and gif files, so each hit keeps quite a few workers busy. ;)

This was at the top of HN for a day or so: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852341
22,638 visits on Apr 17, 10,247 on Apr 18 (according to Google Analytics).
This one http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3894302 got 17,740 and 6,864 on Apr 26 and 27, respectively, from being close to the top.

+1.
Our numbers are 5k, 10k and again around 10k, so this would confirm what you're saying :)

I've had a couple of blog posts hit the front page for a few hours and they only got about 10,000 hits for the whole day. Not insignificant traffic, but it shouldn't be enough to take down a university website.

I studied medicine at the TUM and its sister university, the LMU (The schools teach their med students together for the first two years). Their site would reliably go down every third Friday evening, when the anatomy exam results were posted - meaning they couldn't even handle the minor and expected spike of 600 students downloading a smallish PDF.

I too thought there were only a few (thousand) HNers, but yesterday I learned how wrong I was.
Yesterday I submitted a link (an StackOverflow question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3943556) that got 107 up-votes on HN, but the number of unique visitors went from below 5000 to 25000 (in other words, 20000 unique (based on IP) visitors clicked on my link).

Well ... actually we can. The web server configuration has been changed to handle this amount of requests and it is working pretty good right now. :) We did not really anticipate that much traffic, as it is far more than what we usually see. So the web server was not configured for such a situation and ran out of workers to handle the requests.
Creating a static site at first was just a much faster and safer solution, especially as the original site did not contain anything apart from the two lines of text.

German universities are financed by the states. You probably won't find many good operations people or programmers working for that little money.

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