Surviving the Hacker News “hug of death”


A quick article to mention that one of my articles on the DNS requests made by iPhones made the front page of Hacker News for a few hours. (and it got a lot of interesting comments!)

When your post gets on the front page, there is what we call in the community the “HN hug of death”. It describes the huge traffic you will see on the URL you shared, and sometimes your site becomes unresponsive because the server is bloated.

To be totally honest, I didn’t suffer from it because this blog is running with a very tiny CMS (almost a static website), the server is not a small VM and the front end is not bloated with dozens of requests.

I got 10 114 unique visitors to the blog post from Hacker News on that day, so with a well-optimized website, everything should be fine!

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