Top all-time · #10000
Barry Abrahamson
Personal blog · barry.wordpress.comprogrammingsystems
Barry Abrahamson writes Barry on WordPress, a personal blog at barry.wordpress.com about programming and systems. Since 2008, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times, most often “Load Balancer Update”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Barry Abrahamson's blog for first-hand detail on how WordPress.com is run, including its load balancer choices and nginx setup. Commenters point to it as background on the site's infrastructure.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Barry Abrahamson
Most-linked posts?
- Load Balancer Update4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-05-04
What Hacker News says?
WordPress.com hasn't run on FreeBSD since the TextDrive days which was way before Layered Tech, before me and before WordPress.com was open to the public. We are 100% Debian today, but have used Ubuntu in the past. We never really used HAProxy either. I posted about out load balancer choices back in 2008 - http://barry.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/load-balancer-update/
Comment linking /2008/04/28/load-balancer-update/
on “Wordpress.com serves 70k requests/second using Nginx”Submitted Automattic sponsors SPDY in Nginx dev, to be using on WordPress.com as a story · 8 points
HN discussionOh so you don't have to patch it manually anymore? Patch was very stable, no problems and spdy just works. Apparently work on the patch/module was sponsored by Automattic (WordPress, Matt Mullenweg) so thanks to them and whomever worked on it! Some background here https://barry.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/nginx-spdy-and-automa... ps. REMEMBER you need openssl 1.0.1 - previous versions will not work with spdy and distri…
Comment linking /2012/06/16/nginx-spdy-and-automattic/
on “Nginx-1.3.15 development version released, featuring experimental SPDY module”Submitted Load Balancer Update as a story · 6 points
HN discussionRecently switch all of the WordPress.com load balancers to be nginx. They push a little over a gigabit of traffic right now and about half a billion requests per day, no sweat. We use Spread + Wackamole for failover, there's more info on Barry's blog: http://barry.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/load-balancer-update/ I wouldn't recommend DNS round robin for load balancing. (We did it for a while, many problems and flaws in…
Comment linking /2008/04/28/load-balancer-update/
on “Ask HN: What load balancing software do you use ?”Submitted An inside look at the DDoS attacks that hit Wordpress.com last week as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA good place to start would be Barry's blog: http://barry.wordpress.com/ Hes not updated it in quite awhile though.
Comment linking /
on “How is WordPress.com made?”A regex of machines? Every odd machine in the first datacenter? Software load balancers? Uh, I'm guessing most places do it much more scientifically than that, and I would be very surprised if anyone in the top 100 sites is using a software loadbalancer (I only know of Wordpress using nginx http://barry.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/load-balancer-update/ ). Most places run a dedicated hardward loadbalancers from F5 or Ci…
Comment linking /2008/04/28/load-balancer-update/
on a deleted thread