Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by stevekemp | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

stevekemp·

The traffic killed the server - I'm rebuilding it now with decent RAM, back in 20 minutes..

View on HN

I have to admit I giggled

http://i.imgur.com/H9dBG09.png

Hope the rebuild goes well.

Redeploying is pretty automated, but it looks like I need significant caching on the front-end to cope with load.

I'm a huge fan of Varnish for this sort of thing.

Out of curiosity, what are the specs of the server, and how much RAM is "decent"?

Previously it was running a reasonably heavyweight Perl/CGI front-end on 512Mb RAM.

It's now setting with 4Gb of RAM, and a load of ~40.

The single biggest issue is that the front-page either shows "marketing" or "your details", so it is dynamic and being generated on-demand.

I'll update to cache.

Why not just slap Varnish in front of that and be done?

That would be the end goal - but since all users get cookies there's not obvious "I'm anonymous" vs "I'm a signed-in-user" differentiator I can use to control whether to cache or serve live.

It'll happen, shortly, but the fastest solution was to re-deploy on a scaling platform.

Which brings the next question... why not use Github for authentication?

When a user is logged in, use a Vary: Cookie header, when a user is not logged in, leave that off. Set the expiration time as appropriate.

Perl/CGI is never a good thing.

You might get better response with using perl in fastcgi mode, and using nginx rather than apache.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com