Comment by ndriscoll
20 days ago
I wouldn't expect it to crash in any case, but I'd generally expect that even an n100 minipc should bottleneck on the network long before you manage to saturate CPU/RAM (maybe if you had 10Gbit you could do it). The linked post indicates they're getting ~2 requests/second from bots, which might as well be zero. Even low powered modern hardware can do thousands to tens of thousands.
You completely ignore the fact that they are also requesting a lot of pages that can be expensive to retrieve/calculate.
Beyond something like running an ML model, what web pages are expensive (enough that 1-10 requests/second matters at all) to generate these days?
I've worked on multiple sites like this over my career.
Our pages were expensive to generate, so what scraping did is blew out all our caches by yanking cold pages/images into memory. Page caches, fragment caches, image caches, but also the db working set in ram, making every single thing on the site slow.
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Usually ones that are written in a slow language, do lots of IO to other webservices or databases in a serial, blocking fashion, maybe don't have proper structure or indices in their DBs, and so on. I have seen some really terribly performing spaghetti web sites, and have experience with them collapsing under scraping load. With a mountain of technical debt in the way it can even be challenging to fix such a thing.
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Run a mediawiki, as described in the post. It's very heavy. Specifically for history I'm guessing it has to re-parse the entire page and do all link and template lookups because previous versions of the page won't be in any cache
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