4 ms·

The backend software (custom written by pg) can be buggy and slow at times, but the actual HTML interface is fine for performance.

• pg 17y ago
  It's not that buggy, is it? Requests occasionally time out, but I don't know of much that actually breaks.
  • tokenadult 17y ago
    It depends how demanding the requests are. Just as one example, when I request the list of my own threads (to be sure to respond to replies I may have missed through regular browsing of the site), I OFTEN find that that times out. This is probably more likely to happen to a user with many subscribed threads than to one with few, but I see it happen a lot. I can hardly ever successfully request my list of submitted threads. But perhaps that is just me. My use pattern here is at the extreme end of the distribution.
    • nitrogen 17y ago
      I don't consider myself a particularly frequent poster, but I see the same frequent timeouts when trying to load my threads page. It's the most important page for me personally, because I come here for the conversation with a highly intelligent group more than anything. Nothing else compares to HN's simplicity and community.
    • deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
  • houseabsolute 17y ago
    The comment history and user pages have been very slow lately. I guess it depends on how you define "bug," but at some point slow results cross the threshold, and I think we're there. Not that I/we don't appreciate everything you do. I mean, this whole site is an act of charity so I guess I expect some bugs.
  • cmelbye 17y ago
    Well, there's some small quirks, such as incorrect HTTP status codes: http://news.ycombinator.com/oiqjweofjoqwej http://news.ycombinator.com/oiqjweofjoqwej Also, I thought I remember a problem with reverse proxies and the hacker news server? Can't remember the specifics though.
  • astrec 17y ago
    Rarely buggy, often perceptibly slow (in relative terms where fast HN is your benchmark - generally smokes anything else I use day to day).
  • reitzensteinm 17y ago
    I occasionally see someone else logged in due to a downstream caching bug.
    • pg 17y ago
      Argh, yes, that is due to some Microsoft proxy that caches aggressively. Thanks for reminding me to fix that.
  • deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  • bmm6o 17y ago
    There's the whole "Unknown or expired link" when you wait long enough before clicking "Next" (x?fnid=foo). I understand the cause behind it, but I prefer links that work.
  • blasdel 17y ago
    I'd call the combination of using server-side continuations for form handling (rather pointlessly) and the server needing to be restarted constantly (from memory leaks?) a pretty egregious bug. Forms shouldn't become invalidated because your software is unreliable. When replying, often I'm returned to a random page instead of the one in the whence parameter. After making this comment, I was redirected to /threads?id=pg instead of to /item?id=1243793 The markup in comment threads is extremely broken in Mobile Safari -- font sizes change randomly, sometimes some of the vote arrows will randomly be huge or teeny-tiny. Using Image() to generate GET requests for the vote links is at the very least stupid if not a bug, you should be making a POST using XHR -- and then you could get the new vote total in the response instead of mindlessly incr/decr-ementing the number in the DOM.