6 ms·

Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?

• Scott_MacGregor 16y ago
  Yes, I noticed it too. I don't know what the backend is, but if it's on a single shared machine it might be too many inquires on the hardware at once. Maybe ask the hosting company to move it to a machine with a lower load.
  • lukeqsee 16y ago
    It's an arc backend. (http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/)
  • mrduncan 16y ago
    As of 2 years ago, it was hosted on a "3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1" - it's certainly not a shared machine. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516122 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516122) rtm is the sysadmin for HN (yes, that rtm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris).
    • BrandonM 16y ago
      > rtm is the sysadmin for HN (yes, that rtm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris) It always makes me laugh when someone with no knowledge of a website offers advice to that site's sysadmin. It's especially funny when that sysadmin is of the calibre of RTM.
    • pyre 16y ago
      IIRC, pg said that ycombinator.com (which is where all of HN's static content is served from) was on shared hosting.
      • mrduncan 16y ago
        It looks like ycombinator.com is hosted by SliceHost (http://www.whoishostingthis.com/ycombinator.com http://www.whoishostingthis.com/ycombinator.com).
      • pbogdan 16y ago
        It seems to be on SliceHost (if nothing changed in the mean time) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283430 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283430.
• iuguy 16y ago
  I can't find the HN story, but I seem to remember that PG was rebooting the server quite regularly. It must be pretty difficult when you're looking at having to toss up continuing to use the language with it's limitations or start looking at changes to Arc. Maybe a front-end cache like nginx would help?
  • wwortiz 16y ago
    As stated elsewhere it really seems to be a problem with the static content hosted on ycombinator.com (maybe they aren't being cached very well browser side). I don't know how well something like a front end cache would do to speed up content delivery as I suspect news.yc has a lot more users logged in than normal websites which might take away the advantages of a front end cache.
    • sudont 16y ago
      Webkit's resource tracker shows that most of the static content is taking anywhere from 10-14 seconds to be requested, and then loading with a 304 not modified. The page, from the news.ycombinator subdomain is loading quick, as is the tracking code. (180ms latency) Firefox works the best for me, as it seems to just time out and not request anything.
• scdlbx 16y ago
  I have not had any noticeable problems in the past week.
• kreek 16y ago
  Pages load fine for me, however submitting a comment is taking longer than usual.
• smackfu 16y ago
  I've had the images fail to load, as well as the stylesheet (so all the text comes up as Times New Roman.)
  • kindly 16y ago
    I think it may be due to failing dns lookup. It has been for me anyway. The images and css are on ycombinator.com and not news.ycombinator.com.
• yuvadm 16y ago
  NO. This is not just you, at all. HN has been slow as molasses lately.
• SriniK 16y ago
  Are you having issues with iphone/ipad? Sometimes I too have problem with HN site on my iphone.
• jokermatt999 16y ago
  Yes, and I've checked that it's not the connection or the browser. I'm on XP, so it's likely not the OS either.
  • lukeqsee 16y ago
    I've tried it on OS X with Chrome & Safari + iOS. Same results.
• singer 16y ago
  10 to 20 seconds? That's pretty speedy. I've seen pages take minutes to load. I've noticed the slowness you speak of for a couple of weeks now.
  • lukeqsee 16y ago
    That is slow for the HTML document to be returned (not rendered, but just returned).
    • pig 16y ago
      He is saying that there are HN pages that take minutes to load.
  • xiongchiamiov 16y ago
    Depends on your location and your pipe, I suppose. I expect simple pages like this to be returned and rendered within a second.
• abrudtkuhl 16y ago
  Yea definitely slower
• alt_ 16y ago
  news.ycombinator.com is loading in sub-seconds, but it uses stylesheets and images hosted on ycombinator.com (a separate server) - which is taking 20s+ to respond.
  • smackfu 16y ago
    Makes me wonder if something is off with the caching directives on the static content.
  • pbogdan 16y ago
    It's been slow for me as well past 1-2 weeks and yes, it's problem with static files - they take 20-30s to load. Caching seems to be fine - I'm getting 304s for stylesheets and images (and they are served from local cache according to firebug and chrome dev. tools) which means it actually takes 20-30s of wait time for the server to just return the headers. I wonder if it might be problem with Keep-Alive which is on (with 15 sec. timeout I think) - there's probably bunch of apache processes / threads sitting idle waiting for connections to close and with the amount of traffic hn gets I would imagine there's quite a few of them.
• cosmicray 16y ago
  I'm looking at this page in Safari inspector. The only element that took more than milliseconds to load is prowidget.php (but that may be related to its size, and my slow ass connection). inspector has flagged 3 elements with "You could save bandwidth by having your web server compress this transfer with gzip or zlib": item, news.css and propres.php
• calvinf 16y ago
  It took this page about a minute to load for me and the images are still loading a couple minutes later.
• andreas_bak 16y ago
  It is slow for me as well. It seems that page needs some optimizations in order to be served and rendered faster when the server is under heavy loads. 1. I checked responses using FireBug plugin and it seems that pages are served uncompressed. For example the front page of the site (only html) is 31K uncompressed, with gzip compression it becomes 6.3K (80% smaller size means 80% less bandwidth to use). Most of web servers support compression. 2. All pages seem to be generated on every request, e.g. no HTTP cache is used on server side. Because I did not found any response headers set by caches. If for example, each page was cached just for 1 to 5 seconds it will reduce the stress on database and cpu significantly. On the other hand it will not impact user experience, because cached version is short lived and fresh results will appear on time. For example the front page is the most requested page of the site, assume that it is requested 100 times per second which means 100 queries to the database etc. If this page is cached for 1 second queries and html composition is reduced to 1 time per second. Personally, HTTP caching on server side is my favorite choice because you don't need to modify the program to use it. (super-fast Varnish cache is the most flexible solution I found).
  • smackfu 16y ago
    Wouldn't server side caching run into issues since the page is different for each user? For instance, all the vote up/down buttons seem to have your username hardcoded into them as the href.
    • preek 16y ago
      Yes, it would. I don't know how many people are not logged in, though. Those pages could be cached for a minute or so.
    • andreas_bak 16y ago
      Yes you are right. I did not notice it. HTTP cache is effective on resources that are same for all users. One possible solution is to decouple the personalized data and load it separately using AJAX. Votes are already implemented in a similar way. Generally, I am proponent of HTTP caching. It requires some modifications of web sites in order to be effective but still the whole system remains less complicated, compared to implementations of cache on back-end (like `memcached'). For example reddit, which is similar to HN, is in constant struggle with their cache subsystems (http://blog.reddit.com/2010/05/reddits-may-2010-state-of-servers.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/05/reddits-may-2010-state-of-ser...). I believe it can be avoided by keeping cache and web site code apart.
• d_c 16y ago
  Definitely slower than usual.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• xentronium 16y ago
  Okay for me, though, I am in GMT+3.
• sabat 16y ago
  Posting seems slower than it used to be. I'm sure PG is on the case. No complaints. I'm glad HN exists.
• donniefitz2 16y ago
  Yes, it's been pretty slow lately. The other day it wouldn't load at all for a brief time.
• iamelgringo 16y ago
  It is running slow. YC is doing interviews this week, so PG/RTM are probably chatting to noob founders instead of looking at HN server stats.
• EtienneJohnred 16y ago
  If I just answer "yes" without a long dissertation, will I get downvoted by the elite here? My guess is yes.
• DiabloD3 16y ago
  The text loads quickly for me, but some of the (very few) images are cutting out periodically
• kapitalx 16y ago
  For me it took 1.5 minutes to submit a comment. Lets see how long this one takes! :)
• mikerg87 16y ago
  reading from iPhone is hit and miss. it seems to tell safari on iphone to use older page content. iPad at same point in time always seems to get current stories.
• Semiapies 16y ago
  It's not just you.
• static47 16y ago
  Nope I am having the same issues, glad to know it's not just me!.. although it seems to vary on the time of day.