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Comment by heap_perms

3 days ago

> I host this blog on a single core 128MB VPS

No wonder the site is being hugged to death. 128MB is not a lot. Maybe it's worth to upgrade if you post to hacker news. Just a thought.

It doesnt take much to host a static website. Its all the dynamic stuff/frameworks/db/etc that bogs everything down.

  • Still, 128MB is not enough to even run Debian let alone Apache/NGINX. I’m on my phone, but it doesn’t seem like the author is using Cloudflare or another CDN. I’d like to know what they are doing.

    • 128MB is more than enough to run Debian and serve a static site. I had no issue with doing it a decade ago and it still works fine.

      How much memory do you think it actually takes to accept a TLS connection and copy files from disk to a socket?

      3 replies →

Moving bytes around doesn't take RAM but CPU. Notice how switches don't advertise how many gigabytes of RAM they have, but can push a few gigabits of content around between all 24 ports at once without even going expensive

Also, the HN homepage is pretty tame so long as you don't run WordPress. You don't get more than a few requests per second, so multiply that with the page size (images etc.) and you probably get a few megabits as bandwidth, no problem even for a Raspberry Pi 1 if the sdcard can read fast enough or the files are mapped to RAM by the kernel