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11 Comments

Killed by irony on Hacker News

A few days ago I wrote a short post on Hacker News about how my little project, Bear Blog which was running fairly successfully on a tiny server despite having a decent amount of users. It made it to the front page, but ground my tiny server to dust. Oh the irony.

If you look closely at the title image, you can see when my post made it to the front page.

Previously, a post I'd made about Bear had made it to the front page of HN and stayed there for a full 24 hours. My CDN, Cloudflare, handled the spike in traffic very well with no downtime. This time, however, there were multiple blogs running on subdomains and a discovery feed which people would go click through. The issue here is that my CDN does not cover the subdomained blogs (wildcard subdomains are only available on Cloudflare enterprise).

Long story short, the traffic from HN caused my little Heroku dyno to choke for about half an hour. This resulted in all the comments on the post pointing out the irony of the post. Here's my favourite one so far:

I do appreciate an efficient setup, but irony is even better.

"leopards eating my face" - HermanMartinus 

I felt a bit sheepish, but it was a good problem to have. I thought you may enjoy the story.

  1. 2

    you sure it wasn't a DoS attack?

    This happened with me while posting a a freelance gig side project on HN.. traffic crashed the server

    I was surprised and curious that HN front page could deliver so much traffic.. but then further investigation revealed a DDOS attack.

    1. 1

      Cloudflare should've handled it if it was DDoS

      1. 1

        But Cloudflare wasn’t handling the sub domains, so it may have been a DDoS. I’ll dig through the logs and see if there’s a trend.

  2. 2

    That's hilarious. Makes for a good story though :)

  3. 1

    The good old hug of death. Nice story

  4. 1

    Great story. Hilarious. And congrats!

  5. 1

    Leopards eating my face

    ROFL

  6. 1

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

  7. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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