3 ms·
What causes the crashes? It sounds like a rather bizarre system!
by andrew1 17y ago
What causes the crashes? It sounds like a rather bizarre system!
- jacquesm 17y agoI think it has to do in part with requesting pages that cause large datasets to be accessed, in particular requests for the posting history of say edw519, nickb or other top posters seem to have a (very) bad effect on the server. Some of this has been fixed but it still happens plenty of times. Maybe PG can shed some light on the exact cause of this, I'm just making guesses based on my interaction with the service.
- andrew1 17y agoYes, purely out of curiousity I'd be interested in what's happening behind the scenes. Is memory being leaked? Is garbage collection (assuming it's used) not good enough? Is it a deliberate design choice for HN?
- jacquesm 17y agoTry to retrieve the posting histories of the top 10 of the leaderboard, see if they all come up for you without weirdness happening. I can't get it to work, some will work, some will give blank pages and sometimes the server seems to restart. Would be nice to see what someone else gets.
- streety 17y agoI retrieved the comment histories of the top 10 users without a single glitch. I don't follow any particular users so don't view the comments pages all that often so can only comment on this occasion but no problems encountered this time.
- jacquesm 17y agoSo yours worked and andrews failed 30% of the time. That's even weirder. So maybe once a page has been built recently it then works flawlessly for a bit ?
- jacquesm 17y agotcpdump to the rescue, it seems that I'm getting a lot of RST packets from the server. This may indicate that the socket accept queue is overflowing from time to time. So they're not restarts, they just look like restarts.
- andrew1 17y agoThree out of the ten failed for me.