Kudos to SDF

I posted an article, iOS 7.1 Mobile Safari Minimal UI, earlier this week that ended up on the front page of Hacker News (HN) (getting as high as #5 at its peak). It was great to see my article linked from HN but also a little scary. Why? Well HN generates a lot of traffic and web-sites often go down under the load.

Still, if my site went down it wouldn’t be the end of the world would it?

No. But it would be personally embarrassing. I have written much about making this site scalable and fast. I have advocated static sites, minimalism and optimisation. I have made an effort to reduce this site’s footprint and overheads. It would reflect badly on me if, after all my endeavours, the site didn’t survive a little traffic surge.

Perpetual βeta didn’t go down. In fact, it didn’t seem to suffer at all under the load. But what was the load? I don’t use Google Analytics or any other kind of tracking or monitoring service on this website.¹  So the only way I can get any idea of the impact of the HN link is by looking at Apache’s raw access-log data:

$ grep -c "^\[1[8-9]/Mar/2014.\+/weblog/ios-7-dot-1-mobile-safari-minimal-ui.html" apache.log

This query returns a count of the number of times in which Apache received a request for the URI:

/weblog/ios-7-dot-1-mobile-safari-minimal-ui.html

and also where the access date is either the 18^th or 19^th of March 2014.²  It returns a rather surprising: 217,048 hits. If these were evenly distributed over the ~27.5 hours we’re reporting on then we’re looking at ~9000 accesses per hour.³

It was rewarding to see that my website didn’t falter under this load. Out of curiosity, I periodically visited the page, with an empty cache, whilst it was on HN’s front page to check its availability and see how it was holding up. I surprised me to see that it remained as fast under load as it is in normal conditions, taking ~1.5 seconds to load the linked article (including its assets).

So here’s what blows my mind: this website isn’t hosted on a dedicated, high-performance server — it’s on a shared Apache box along with ~300 other websites!

It’s a testament to the SDF that this site stayed up and remained fast during its flirtation with Hacker News. I’d like to take this opportunity thank everyone at SDF⁴ for providing me with a platform that is both speedy and resilient.