I work at night. Late. Lately, all night. More or less… hacking away in the complete peace and quiet. And I periodically check Hacker News – and sometimes, like yesterday morning I submit something. #antisec had gotten ahold of 12 million iphone UDID’s and released a million of them out into the wild. I immediately followed their excellent instructions on checking and downloading the archive and checked to see if my UDID was in there. It wasn’t.
I had spent a long time trying to work out a sensible and efficient architecture for use on cheap VPS boxes. Xen for virtualization – because you’re guaranteed an amount of memory and it’s tough for VPS providers to oversell Xen boxes, Ubuntu which I love – Natty Narwhal, and I ended up using Lighttpd for the web server. It supposed to be light and efficient, and it is.
The second important decision was using php5-fpm – what I really like is that each virtual host can run as its own userID – so if anything bad happened, it would limit the damage, not to mention the speed.
The hits started coming immediately… uh oh. First thing to do – backup everything just in case the server blows up… done. Then I watched as my entry hit the top of Hacker News, hit Slashdot, NBC news, FOX news, Le Figaro… holy crap.
Then it happened.
Nothing. The server didn’t break a sweat. The load average may have gone over 1 once… as of now, over 350K hits on a server I pay $15 a month for from Empire Hosting.
I think the combination of Lighttpd+php5-fpm is underappreciated…
Of course the question of what to do with all this traffic? Leverage it! Nope. That’s not the point. I had to put a link to some of my details up when someone (wisely) thought that this might just be a UDID sucker… other than that, my wife is a writer of literary crime fiction and she was jealous^H^H^H^H^H^H^H upset that her blog got so few hits… so I added a link… interesting side effect, 1% of the incoming traffic did visit Bunny Island…
The lesson is really simple. Make it work, put it out. You can make it pretty later, maybe.
That was a trip… thanks HackerNews.