I can’t put my finger on anything within the last decade, but I seem to recall it running in something close to its current form on a single core on a single server for a long time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522

Re: traffic, dang said (2022):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140

I took it as a good reminder that the hard part is the human part: that high-overhead features and UI fripperies are nice but not necessary (or sufficient) to keep a community healthy and vibrant over the decades.

(And on the subject of the human side, if you didn’t catch Anna Wiener’s 2019 profile, it’s here:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... )

From dang's 2022 comment about traffic:

The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it.

I find that surprising, as 2011-2022 covers an exponential rise in SEO spam and "growth hackers" attempting to drive traffic and links.

Or was 1,300 the number of non-flagged submissions?

The other reality is that as much as this industry is up its ass about scalability you can run a very very busy site on a single machine now a days.

A lot of people out here designing their blogs like its 1989.