My blog has been in the top 5 a few times. When you reach the top 3 positions, you can expect around 150-250 simultaneous users for a few hours.
Top 5 is more like 50-75.
Top 15 is around 25-50.
Those numbers aren't req/sec but simultaneous user. There's a difference between the two but it still gives you a number to compare things to.
All you read about how the top 3 gets 75% of the traffic in Google is true to about every places where there's ordering.
As for the load, it depends a lot, that website seems to poll HN's API quite a lot so maybe that's how they get down (HN throttle the # of query).
I made it on the top 5 with a VPS on 128MB of RAM and didn't even feel it (without caching). You need a LOT of traffic for a blog to be affected by the load.
Obviously, when you do a lot of polling/database intensive stuff (games, etc.) the bottlenecks are easier to reach.
Top 5 is more like 50-75.
Top 15 is around 25-50.
Those numbers aren't req/sec but simultaneous user. There's a difference between the two but it still gives you a number to compare things to.
All you read about how the top 3 gets 75% of the traffic in Google is true to about every places where there's ordering.
As for the load, it depends a lot, that website seems to poll HN's API quite a lot so maybe that's how they get down (HN throttle the # of query).
I made it on the top 5 with a VPS on 128MB of RAM and didn't even feel it (without caching). You need a LOT of traffic for a blog to be affected by the load.
Obviously, when you do a lot of polling/database intensive stuff (games, etc.) the bottlenecks are easier to reach.