Comment by mbac32768

HN is not really that much of a workload. Links with text only comments, each link gets a few hundred comments at most, and commenting on stories ends after they are old enough.

Probably everything that's current fits easily in RAM and the older stories are candidates for serving from a static cache.

I wouldn't say this is an astounding technical achievement so much as demonstrating that simplicity can fall out of good taste and resisting groupthink around "best practices".