Real-time heatmap example with Javascript and HTMLCanvas

It's a shame sites can't handle HN-level traffic automatically. My own site got borked when I put it on here without knowing much about web server configurations. Are there some standard practices which one should know?

rarestblog• 16 years ago

Basic VPS (on stable provider) + nginx + php-fpm + eaccelerator, barely noticing any kind of traffic spikes (handled SlashDot, HN, HabraHabr, Reddit, Delicious, many others).

Of course it depends on how intensive your app is, but for moderately loaded site - this combination is more than enough. For ex. I've tested Wordpress with this configuration - it can handle nearly 70 mil. hits per day (including into this number hits to images, so probably around 10 mil. actual visitors).

Wouldn't recommend for real-time upgrade (during spike). For real-time go for this: http://gist.github.com/638751 (if load average > 5 - sorry, exit). Crude, cruel, but helped me survive being unexpectedly TechCrunch'd on Apache (didn't know about nginx at the time), then you can finally edit your files, go for caching of nearly everything.

jlongster• 16 years ago

Is HN traffic really that heavy? Last summer I made #5 on one post and #1 on another one. Here are the stats for those two posts:

http://jlongster.com/media/static/stats.png

It's only a couple thousand. Maybe this link got passed around a lot more, but it's not too hard to scale up to several thousand.

jayliew• 16 years ago

It works for me here in San Diego - took a little while to load but it works. Just open in another tab and come back later

NewHighScore• 16 years ago

This is a really neat idea, but it seems to track how fast the mouse moves over the canvas instead of the amount of time the mouse is over parts of the canvas.

micky_25• 16 years ago

if anyones interested these guys created something similar for the node knockout competition.

http://paularmstrong.github.com/nko-jackalope-promo

pa7• 16 years ago

hey guys its up again, I didn't know that my webserver wouldn't be able to handle such an amount of traffic. I reconfigured the webserver, now it should be ok. I'm going to add iPhone/iPad touchmove support for the canvas heatmap example in the next days. cheers, Patrick

Real-time heatmap example with Javascript and HTMLCanvas

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