4 ms·

HN Uptime Visualized: Lots of mini-outages lately?

20 points by chaosmachine 17y ago

chaosmachine 17y ago
Almost seems to be doing a hockey stick, if you look at the last 6 months.
fossguy 17y ago
what tool do you use to generate these stats?
- ronnier 17y ago
  The graphs look like MRTG. Probably running a request every few minutes and looking at the response, if there is one, and plotting it. http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/ http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
- caller9 17y ago
  You could combine Nagios, Lilac, and PNP4Nagios to get some pretty good monitoring with graphs(PNP4Nagios), notification(Nagios), and the ability to configure new servers from templates(Lilac). Not for the feint of heart, but not outright tedious. With some slight hackery you can even graph and alert on windows drive freespace.
pmjordan 17y ago
It's weird, when HN goes down, it seems to accept the HTTP connection, but closes it again once the request is sent. I'm not sure on the exact timing, but I'm definitely never getting "connection refused" or an actual HTTP error code. No other site behaves like that.
- derefr 17y ago
  I'm guessing there's a proxy or load-balancer involved—the backend goes down, but the proxy stays up, so when you send your request it gets forwarded first, and then fails.
  - wmf 17y ago
    A working proxy would send a 500 error. The closed connections are a telltale sign of an amateur Web server; probably written in Arc in this case.
    - Zak 17y ago
      An outdated version of the HN source code, including its web server is distributed along with Arc.
Groxx 17y ago
I've been noticing it too, was wondering if it was just me ( downforeveryoneorjustme.com said it was just me, though that could be because it came up in the meantime).
swombat 17y ago
I think I heard somewhere that HN is auto-rebooted every half hour or so.
- pg 17y ago
  No, I manually restart it when it gets slow.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
rogermugs 17y ago
if you manage to hack HN you're going to lose some karma... but lets be honest... you're also gonna get some mad props.
pg 17y ago
I forget exactly why, but attempts to connect get ignored when MzScheme is in the middle of GCing. I'm going to start tossing old stuff back out of memory, which should mitigate the problem, but I've been too busy with YC lately to work on HN.

20 points by chaosmachine 17y ago

chaosmachine 17y ago

Almost seems to be doing a hockey stick, if you look at the last 6 months.

fossguy 17y ago

what tool do you use to generate these stats?

ronnier 17y ago
The graphs look like MRTG. Probably running a request every few minutes and looking at the response, if there is one, and plotting it. http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/ http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
caller9 17y ago
You could combine Nagios, Lilac, and PNP4Nagios to get some pretty good monitoring with graphs(PNP4Nagios), notification(Nagios), and the ability to configure new servers from templates(Lilac). Not for the feint of heart, but not outright tedious. With some slight hackery you can even graph and alert on windows drive freespace.

pmjordan 17y ago

It's weird, when HN goes down, it seems to accept the HTTP connection, but closes it again once the request is sent. I'm not sure on the exact timing, but I'm definitely never getting "connection refused" or an actual HTTP error code. No other site behaves like that.

derefr 17y ago
I'm guessing there's a proxy or load-balancer involved—the backend goes down, but the proxy stays up, so when you send your request it gets forwarded first, and then fails.
- wmf 17y ago
  A working proxy would send a 500 error. The closed connections are a telltale sign of an amateur Web server; probably written in Arc in this case.
  - Zak 17y ago
    An outdated version of the HN source code, including its web server is distributed along with Arc.

Groxx 17y ago

I've been noticing it too, was wondering if it was just me ( downforeveryoneorjustme.com said it was just me, though that could be because it came up in the meantime).

swombat 17y ago

I think I heard somewhere that HN is auto-rebooted every half hour or so.

pg 17y ago
No, I manually restart it when it gets slow.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

rogermugs 17y ago

if you manage to hack HN you're going to lose some karma... but lets be honest... you're also gonna get some mad props.

pg 17y ago

I forget exactly why, but attempts to connect get ignored when MzScheme is in the middle of GCing. I'm going to start tossing old stuff back out of memory, which should mitigate the problem, but I've been too busy with YC lately to work on HN.