50RPS must be tuned or cached in some way, as the memory load for 50 requests to the full app should overwhelm the 1GB server and ~50-100ms is typical and the $5 instance has one core.

No tuning. I just installed WP, nginx, and MariaDB.

Here are the numbers from when I was testing how much comment threads impacts load time:

http://imgur.com/gallery/IQk2kun

Ah, sorry. I expected Apache. Nice numbers.

Huh. That's a lot lower than I expected for a high ranked HN post. I'll agree, WP didn't start having issues until the 50-100+ range.

My site has also hit #2 on HN multiple times and never broken 10RPS during any of those times, AFIK.

Thank you for sharing. :)