We currently get just over 200k uniques and just under 2m page views on weekdays (less on weekends).

Thank you for creating a wonderful source of information!

Does a single server support this level of traffic? That is pretty impressive - it would be great to learn about the server's hardware and software configuration.

Old server: two Xeon E5450 chips, 3.0 GHz, 8 cores total, 24 GB RAM.

New server: one Xeon E5-2690 chip, 2.9 GHz, 8 cores total, 32 GB RAM.

Wow, nice, that was exactly the HW I was predicting; the fastest single-core-performance xeon under turboboost.

I don't know whether things have changed since, but some time ago (a year or more?), IIRC pg mentioned that the site was running on a single core. (I don't recall his saying what type of core.)

P.S. I see that abstractbill beat me to it, both in stating here and in originally acquiring this information:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229548

Around 40-60 requests per second, of which almost anything an be cached. Any single server should suffice.

But you would need at least 30 Heroku dynos to handle that reliably ;)

As of October 5th 2011:

"Also, a traffic update: HN now gets over 120k unique ips on a weekday, and serves over 1.3 million page views."

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

Additionally:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com

don't you dare mention alexa stats here

Why? (genuine question)

They are known to be very wrong.