The Frontpage of Hacker News: Stats, Graphs & Some Analysis

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Mattias Geniar, January 18, 2015

Follow me on Twitter as @mattiasgeniar

A week ago, I found what I consider a bug in Audi’s cruise control functions. So I did what I always do, I whipped up a blogpost. On Monday, I submitted that post to HN, and it worked.

Hacker News

Within minutes of submitting of submitting to Hacker News, the upvotes started. It reached the frontpage in about 20-30 minutes, and it stayed there for the entire day.

The first few hours after submitting, it even got stuck at the very top of the page.

hn_frontpage

That was fun.

The Numbers

I then did what every normal geek does when he finds his post made it to the top of HN, I looked at my Google Analytics stats.

hn_frontpage_google_analytics

Not bad.

But I got a bit worried. Could my pretty little server handle this? I run SSL on this site and a pretty “default” WordPress. Luckily, I installed Wordfence which generates a static HTML version of each post, so it didn’t have to go through the PHP -> MySQL dance every single time.

HTTP req/s and bandwidth consumed

The CPU load was mostly running around 20-25%, and was taken up by Nginx. That means the load came from the SSL handling, not from PHP.

Around its peak, the server was happily pushing around 600 HTTP req/s.

hn_frontpage_nginx_requests

And because the page consisted of 2 (non-optimised) images, it consumed a considerable amount of bandwidth as well. In about 30 minutes, my server went from 1Mbps to just short of 60Mbps.

hn_frontpage_network_traffic

In the longer run, you can see the peak very clearly and it starts to slowly diminish after 2 hours.

hn_frontpage_latest_6_hours

Thankfully, the server bandwidth is on the house. ;-)

Pageview statistics

In terms of actual pageviews, I feel I can’t complain. The post made it to 100 upvotes, which is about the average of an HN frontpage post.

It doesn’t come close to the 700+ upvoted posts obviously, those will get a multitude of this traffic.

hn_frontpage_google_analytics_stats

The stats above show Google Analytics, which measured a total of 25.090 pageviews.

hn_frontpage_jetpack_stats

WordPress’ Jetpack plugin, which also does statistics, measured a total of 27.464 visits, which is shown in the image above.

If I look at the raw Nginx access logs, I count a total of 37.955 hits to that particular page. That includes bots, scrapers, link-prefetchers (like Reddit, Twitter, …), …

hn_frontpage_browser_stats

More than 60% of the browser share went to Google Chrome, with Firefox at 16%, Safari at 12% and IE taking less than 2% of the share. On HN, it’s obvious Chrome has won the war.

Internet Comments: YOLO

And besides a few dickhead comments, I feel the post did alright.

hn_comments_1

We’ll always have those.

hn_comments_2

I did relax, actually. Thanks for the advise!

Lessons learned

All in all, I’m very happy with the numbers.

I’m also happy I took the time to install a static HTML generator for WordPress, otherwise my server couldn’t have handled the load.

I should have optimised the images in the page (which are around 700Kb in size, each), if I took them down to < 100Kb each it would have saved 600% in terms of bandwidth consumed. I merely uploaded them to the server and embedded them, which was foolish. I also missed a few opportunities to lure that HN traffic onto other posts, I didn’t link to anything else and most of the exit traffic was on the same page. So my “marketing skills” need some more work. ;-)



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