Title: Studying the impact of being on Hacker News first page
       Author: Solène
       Date: 27 July 2021
       Tags: networking openbsd blog
       Description: 
       
       # Introduction
       
       Since beginning of 2021, my blog has been popular a few times on the
       website Hacker News and it draws a lot of traffic.  This is a report of
       the traffic generated by Hacker News because I found this topic quite
       interesting.
       
 (HTM) Hacker News website: a portal where people give interesting URL and members can vote/comment the link
       
       # Data
       
       From data gathered from the http server access logs, my blog has an
       average of 1200 visitors and 1100 hits every day.
       
       The blog was featured on hacker news: 16th February, 10th May, 7th July
       and 24th July.  On the following diagram, you can see each spike being
       an appearance on hacker news.
       
       What's really interesting, is the different between 24th July and the
       other spikes, only 24th July appearance made up to the front page of
       hacker news.  That day, the server received 36 000 visitors and 132 000
       hits and it continued the next date at a slower rate but still a lot
       more noticeable than other spikes.
       
 (IMG) Visitors/Hits of the blog (generated using goaccess)
       
       The following diagram comes from the tool pfstat, gathering data from
       the OpenBSD firewall to produce images.  We can see the firewall is
       usually at a rate of ~35 new TCP states per seconds, on 24th July, it
       drastically increased very fast to 230 states per second for at least
       12h and the load continued for days compared to the usual traffic.
       
 (IMG) Firewall states per second
       
       # Conclusion
       
       I don't have much more data than this, but it's already interesting to
       see the insane traffic drag and audience that Hacker News can generate.
        Having a static website and enough bandwidth didn't made it hard to
       absorb the load, but if you have a dynamic website running code, you
       could be worried to be featured on Hacker News which would certainly
       trigger a denial of service.
       
 (HTM) Wikipedia article on the "Slashdot effect" explaining this phenomena