tahoecoder

Go to French Pass on the northern tip of the south island. It's a beautiful and remote spot.

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.

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?

Must be your internet. My server load time is hanging steady at 455 ms.

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.

Fixed those errors. Thanks.

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.