Can someone with some more experience explain why this happens? The most basic webserver, like a TCP socket served from a C program, serving some files etc. can take tens of thousands of requests per second, per core, on reasonably recent hardware.
What's going on that's taking down these sites, really, when its not a quota limit?
> Can someone with some more experience explain why this happens? The most basic webserver, like a TCP socket served from a C program, serving some files etc. can take tens of thousands of requests per second, per core, on reasonably recent hardware.
Back then it was Wordpress/PHP with no caching.
But: you're right.
Once upon a time named Maxim made a web page that pointed out that a Pentium III should be able to handle 10K simultaneous requests, then said Apache was shit, and that he had made his own webserver, and because he was Russian he filled the webpage with animated hammers and sickles.
Kind of funny to find this on the front page of HN. Makes me wonder what percentage of today's HN readers didn't live through the Slashdot era. (I'm aware it's still around.)
No one in 2025 should be allowed to criticize early 2000s web practices as we have come full circle in many ways.
They were limited by tools and resources. Now you'll just see some async "API endpoint error -32768 timeout" and 8,000 spinning pinwheels on the page instead of it simply hanging. Because now you need to allocate 650MB RAM so you can output Hello World in some buggy "stack" with "memory safety".
The smart ones were using Java 25 years ago and what needed some 80lb Solaris box could run off a mobile phone now.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 30.3 ms ] threadWhat's going on that's taking down these sites, really, when its not a quota limit?
Back then it was Wordpress/PHP with no caching.
But: you're right.
Once upon a time named Maxim made a web page that pointed out that a Pentium III should be able to handle 10K simultaneous requests, then said Apache was shit, and that he had made his own webserver, and because he was Russian he filled the webpage with animated hammers and sickles.
This was how NGINX was created.
They were limited by tools and resources. Now you'll just see some async "API endpoint error -32768 timeout" and 8,000 spinning pinwheels on the page instead of it simply hanging. Because now you need to allocate 650MB RAM so you can output Hello World in some buggy "stack" with "memory safety".
The smart ones were using Java 25 years ago and what needed some 80lb Solaris box could run off a mobile phone now.