Having had sites of mine get to the top of HN multiple times, it's always been around 4 visits per second. (= 15K/hr, or ~100K total over the course of a story.)
Given that things like grabbing something from the database or serving up an image are on the order of a handful of milliseconds... it should be fine.
If HN were sending 1,000 visits per second it would be a totally different story. But it's not. The amount of traffic just isn't that much.
Having had sites of mine get to the top of HN multiple times, it's always been around 4 visits per second. (= 15K/hr, or ~100K total over the course of a story.)
Given that things like grabbing something from the database or serving up an image are on the order of a handful of milliseconds... it should be fine.
If HN were sending 1,000 visits per second it would be a totally different story. But it's not. The amount of traffic just isn't that much.