Comment by procaryote

2 months ago

750k items in their content management sysem. N independent labs crawling wanting to check that every day could easily give bursts of millions per hour

Millions per hour is tens per second though; perhaps the fix is performance improvements

We have put in a number of performance improvements, yes. The nice thing about those is that they also make the site snappier when it's not under load. Right now we have just over a million items in our CMS, plus our publicly available mailing list archives, which are much larger, even if they're less frequently referenced.

Yeah we can just rewrite the web servers in Rust ;)

That'll be great until.. they rewrite the scrapers in Rust! Then we're really hosed!