Creating a daily average of concurrent visits isn't relevant. Servers don't take an average of all the possible future hours of complete inactivity when they are serving up requests.
The post was only up at the top for a couple of hours before the server performance got so bad such that everyone started flagging it. My post then dropped off the front page and quickly went to page 4 or 5 due to the flagging.
I agree with you that the more interesting number would be the the concurrent number of requests.
Lots of people are misunderstanding that chartbeat figure. It's not 287 visits in a 45 minute window. These are visitors who are currently interacting with your site. Some are idle but most aren't.
Knowing how many people are on your pages at any one time isn't a meaningless number. You're right in the sense that it's not a great way to assess quantitative site load. I just used that number in the blog to give a qualitative assessment of how many people were currently on my site.
Also, you are misunderstanding this chartbeat number. These 282 visitors weren't spread out over 45 minutes. These are real time users. Granted, some users are idle but most are interacting with the pages.
If this blog post were about the specifics of server load from a #1 HN post, I wouldn't even use the chartbeat figure. The post was about middleman + s3 + cloudfront. The chartbeat figure was more than enough to give readers a qualitative glance of how many people were looking at my site.
Not sure why I have to defend the number. I think any #1 post would see 287 concurrents. http://imgur.com/yfn9Dnd (look at the 30 day max). I was a little off, it was 282 concurrents.
My main site, AppRaptor, isn't on octopress. Just this blog. I agree with you 100% that the problem was apache + mod_php. Nginx would have probably been better. I decided to try out this s3 + cloudfront solution instead, though. I'll take a look at nanoc. Thanks for the info.
Fair enough. I think we are all sick of hearing about WP Supercache.
My post was about middleman + s3 + cloudfront, however. I think this combination of tools isn't as well known and some people could benefit from knowing about them.
A lot of people on HN are still learning things like this. I understand that a post like this doesn't add any value to someone like you who probably knows this stuff inside and out, but I'm grateful for posts that give me insight into new tools that can help me. This isn't just a community for people with 10 years of programming experience.
Should I not try to help out the community with blog posts about my experience? Should we just cater to the experts?
The issue is a static site shouldn't even need to use caching techniques.
When I'm building an app I will use memcached with redis. But this post was just about getting a host environment/workflow for situations in which you want the ease of development that server side languages provide (shared code includes, etc.) and not have to deal with things like caching.
I did make a lot of changes suggested. I changed my about page a lot, and made copy changes to much of the stuff on the homepage. Keep in mind that this site is still a work in progress and I got caught up with other stuff the rest of the week. I will probably make more of the HN suggested changes later. I'm just saying that not all recommendations fit in with the author's view on something.
Also, it's unreasonable to expect the author to make every change which is recommended. Some things are judgement calls. I really appreciated the feedback of HN and acted on most things suggested, but not everything.
I beg to differ. I changed a lot of stuff which was recommended by HN. What errors do you see? The main thing I didn't change was I kept the open source stuff highlighted because the vast majority of people visiting the site will want to find those resources.
My site made it to #1 on hacker news last wednesday for a couple of hours. It peaked at 287 concurrents. Unfortunately, I wasn't expecting that kind of surge and only had it on a small linode, so it couldn't handle the traffic. Since then, I've moved it to an S3 bucket with cloudfront as a cdn. http://www.appraptor.com
Yeah, I supposed more people would just be interested in the free stuff so I made it easier for them to find it. My rationale was if somebody liked my work then they wouldn't mind searching a bit more for the hire me link. Perhaps I should switch them, though. It is a business after all.
Excellent points. I've mainly been working remotely, but I am also willing to travel to the bay area to visit clients (might even move there soon). I will make some changes to that page to include my skype contact as well.