I'd warn HN users not to click on that link simply because it will load a 26Mb message that will likely cause quite a strain on kernel.org's servers if everyone here does it.

I was curious how much of an impact HN could have. Napkin math:

HN gets 24M views a day. Assume those views are evenly distributed across the front page (they aren’t), and that’s about 1M views for each front page post, assuming each user clicks on one post.

By the rule of 10s (also not exact), there are 10x less views on comment threads. So assume around 100k views on a comment thread as a theoretical average.

If everyone in this thread clicked on the link, that would be 2.6 TB of transfer across the day. But by the rule of 10’s we have to assume 10x fewer people will interact (upvote, click, anything) than view. So we’re down to 260GB transfer over the course of a day.

I wonder how close that is. It seems plausible that a link in the top comment of a thread could garner 10,000 clicks.

That’s still about one click every 8 seconds, which at 10Mbit/s would indeed overwhelm the server by a factor of about 2.5x. But I clicked through and it loaded in just a few seconds, so presumably the pipe is faster than 10Mbit/s.

Another caveat is that many websites are already several megabytes, so it seems strange that 26Mb would be the breaking point for a reasonable web host.

It's mirrored by Akamai, which is designed to repeatedly serve the same thing over and over. It won't really hurt anyone.

Does a 26MB message actually cause noticeable strain on the server much beyond loading the page? I would think serving a contiguous 26MB chunk would be relatively similar to say 20 normal sized messages.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260518134447/https://lore.kern...

The page is gzipped in transit - only 5 MB of traffic are generated.

Thank you for the warning. I rarely click on links these days though; only exception I make for HN links for main articles.