August 27, 2024 at 2:30:40 PM UTC

	Since	posts	replies	likes	reposts and quotes	views
Bluesky	May 2023	1,039	8,236	23,127	2,380
Mastodon	Nov 2022	2,399	29,156	55,396	16,820
GitHub	Jul 2010	179	5,777 3,520	33,866	3,317
npm	Jul 2014	139	1,546			75,991,720
YouTube	Dec 2015	30		1,203		32,713
Letterboxd	Mar 2026	55
Blog	Nov 2025	20
Hacker News	Jan 2011	59	575	802
All	Jul 2010	4,807	37,967	114,394	22,517	76,024,433

In reply to Mastodon post

Found a pretty hefty blog post about concurrency benchmarks using the Nginx web server.

https://blog.nginx.org/blog/testing-the-performance-of-nginx-and-nginx-plus-web-servers

Looks like the slowest metric (1 CPU, HTTPS) handled 428 connections per second.

6 replies

William O'Connell 27 min later

@zachleat Yeah, even if all ~30,000 mastodon instances hit the server within 60 seconds (unlikely), that's still only 500 requests per second. That seems pretty manageable? At least for public content that's identical for every user. A real DDoS by an attacker can be *millions* of requests per second.
1. Zach Leatherman 46 min later
  
  @williamoconnell yeah, that third blog post notes a hypothetical of 6.7k simultaneous requests—which seems like a lot!
  1. William O'Connell 1 hr later
    
    @zachleat It says they're supposed to be spread over 60 seconds though. In practice probably more, since it should take some time for all the instances to pick up the post in the first place. The author says "I'm yet to see that work for me" but I'm unclear of that means they have evidence that it isn't happening or their site is just still crashing regardless. The lack of specific data makes it hard to draw conclusions.
    1. Zach Leatherman 1 hr later
      
      @williamoconnell I’d assume that is just a timing issue between writing of the blog post and the rollout of the 60s “jitter” addition—a temporary mitigation for sure.
      Mastodon *could* upload the preview as an asset sidecar’d with the post, similar to any image upload.
John Hobbs 6 hr later

@zachleat I would think with session reuse you wouldn't pay that TLS connection cost constantly. Also I imagine OpenSSL/BoringSSL has improved in the last seven years, and more cryptographic operations are done in CPU now then back then.
That said I don't think I'd run anything without a caching server in front anymore, unless it was very server interactive and would miss constantly. Varnish did amazing things at Flywheel.
1. Zach Leatherman 2 days later
  
  @jmhobbs great insight, thank you!
  As a side note I think I’ve seen some of these caching defaults play out at the serverless platform level recently: https://www.zachleat.com/web/serverless-cost/ Some platforms are born from use cases that are intensely personalized, not heavily cached.