3 ms·

Sure, of course it can be much worse, and almost all other sites are. I'm just saying that HN could do it better, because there's no need for it to send a redir

Sure, of course it can be much worse, and almost all other sites are. I'm just saying that HN could do it better, because there's no need for it to send a redirect or that full-page response unless the user has JS disabled. With JS, they could send a completely empty HTTP 200 response and it would work exactly the same (it does nothing with the response anyway). Right now HN is probably sending multiple gigabytes worth of responses to voting every day that are all just thrown away.

noobermin 7y ago
>almost all other sites are. That's their point. You're not wrong, you can always be better, but HN is barebones compared to almost all (using the mathematical definition...alright, facetiously using it) other sites.
- netfl0 7y ago
  He is wrong. It is not “quite bad”. I appreciate your generosity to him but I am sad to see that is the top comment.
  - Deimorz 7y ago
    How could it possibly be considered a good thing? I've seen dang say before that they've been running into performance issues, and I bet that they'd see a significant drop in resource usage solely by not generating entire comments pages just to throw them away every time anyone votes on a comment. The response is literally not used at all, they're doing that work and sending that data for no reason. There are multiple downsides and not a single benefit to the current method.
    - samtheprogram 7y ago
      It's implemented this way for balance of a simple implementation and how lightweight it is. Not to mention, there is at least one benefit: the voting mechanism doesn't depend on JavaScript. And if you are not authenticated, you are instead taken to a login page. Logging in then gives you the redirect and the upvote is registered.
      - 171243 7y ago
        So just to clarify, this behavior seems to be by design. In that case it does seem the original comment is objectively wrong if the code is readable and maintainable and accomplishes the desired behavior.
        csande17 7y ago
        As parent comments mention, sending back the whole-page response when you vote on a comment is a great idea if you have JavaScript disabled or aren't logged in. But it'd be a quick performance win if it didn't do that when you were logged in with JavaScript enabled. The actual JavaScript part of this is actually already implemented -- that's why the page doesn't refresh when you upvote my comment -- so you'd just need one if-statement on the server side to send a blank response instead of a redirect. Sure, 10 KB of download and the server CPU time needed to re-generate the listing page is probably pretty negligible, but multiply that by the number of votes casted on Hacker News every day and it starts to add up.
        Deimorz 7y ago
        Exactly, and it even adds up quickly for a single user in common cases like voting on a bunch of comments while reading a thread. If someone loads this thread right now, the initial page load is 61KB (gzipped). If they read down the thread and vote on 30 comments while they're doing it, they transfer an additional 480KB (16KB/vote [1]). There's no reason that they should be receiving 8x more data by voting on a relatively low number of comments (~10% of the thread) than they did when loading the entire page originally. It also has to re-generate the page an extra 30 times unnecessarily - a repeatedly voting user becomes like a heavy multiplier to your traffic. [1]: Also, I just noticed that the responses back from voting actually aren't the full page, they're truncated. It seems like maybe the response size is capped at 16KB gzipped? That implies that there's already some kind of special handling for the voting responses.
        southerntofu 7y ago
        From what i can see, the response only contains the comment you upvoted and its children. It's important for people like me who don't have Javascript, but the JS voting system could probably do with a simple HEAD request.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      > How could it possibly be considered a good thing? It will work with any possible browser under any reasonably foreseeable condition with no maintenance on the part of the HN crew. > I bet that they'd see a significant drop in resource usage solely by not generating entire comments pages just to throw them away every time anyone votes on a comment. If there is a serious performance problem they will presumably do some analysis and make changes related to the most serious bottleneck. > There are multiple downsides There are multiple irrelevant hypotheticals. If anyone cares about the heavy-weight HN, I hope they don't accidentally click the link to the article and discover the wider internet with images and whatnot.
- drusepth 7y ago
  Comparing to Facebook is probably the worst possible comparison, though, and doesn't seem representative of most other sites.
  - GoblinSlayer 7y ago
    Only a very few sites are not bloated Facebook clone abominations.
- neop1x 7y ago
  True. And I can see that some webs gradually stop working if you are using JS blockers. For example Aliexpress used to work fine with uMatrix. Now, if I click on the Next page in the paginator, it behaves like it loaded the next page, jumps to top, but it didn't - it just changed URL location. So I have to CTRL+R to reload the whole page to force their server-side rendering. I know it is theoretically my problem but I have to use JS blocking to stop (for me useless) ads and malware scripts. If they just loaded content from their domain or sub-domains, it would work perfectly fine. And if it were old-school server-rendered website, it would probably work faster, as it was discussed here some time ago. I have a feeling that web devs are sometimes over-engineering it. Web browser is HTML viewer, not an operating system.

noobermin 7y ago

>almost all other sites are. That's their point. You're not wrong, you can always be better, but HN is barebones compared to almost all (using the mathematical definition...alright, facetiously using it) other sites.

netfl0 7y ago
He is wrong. It is not “quite bad”. I appreciate your generosity to him but I am sad to see that is the top comment.
- Deimorz 7y ago
  How could it possibly be considered a good thing? I've seen dang say before that they've been running into performance issues, and I bet that they'd see a significant drop in resource usage solely by not generating entire comments pages just to throw them away every time anyone votes on a comment. The response is literally not used at all, they're doing that work and sending that data for no reason. There are multiple downsides and not a single benefit to the current method.
  - samtheprogram 7y ago
    It's implemented this way for balance of a simple implementation and how lightweight it is. Not to mention, there is at least one benefit: the voting mechanism doesn't depend on JavaScript. And if you are not authenticated, you are instead taken to a login page. Logging in then gives you the redirect and the upvote is registered.
    - 171243 7y ago
      So just to clarify, this behavior seems to be by design. In that case it does seem the original comment is objectively wrong if the code is readable and maintainable and accomplishes the desired behavior.
      - csande17 7y ago
        As parent comments mention, sending back the whole-page response when you vote on a comment is a great idea if you have JavaScript disabled or aren't logged in. But it'd be a quick performance win if it didn't do that when you were logged in with JavaScript enabled. The actual JavaScript part of this is actually already implemented -- that's why the page doesn't refresh when you upvote my comment -- so you'd just need one if-statement on the server side to send a blank response instead of a redirect. Sure, 10 KB of download and the server CPU time needed to re-generate the listing page is probably pretty negligible, but multiply that by the number of votes casted on Hacker News every day and it starts to add up.
        Deimorz 7y ago
        Exactly, and it even adds up quickly for a single user in common cases like voting on a bunch of comments while reading a thread. If someone loads this thread right now, the initial page load is 61KB (gzipped). If they read down the thread and vote on 30 comments while they're doing it, they transfer an additional 480KB (16KB/vote [1]). There's no reason that they should be receiving 8x more data by voting on a relatively low number of comments (~10% of the thread) than they did when loading the entire page originally. It also has to re-generate the page an extra 30 times unnecessarily - a repeatedly voting user becomes like a heavy multiplier to your traffic. [1]: Also, I just noticed that the responses back from voting actually aren't the full page, they're truncated. It seems like maybe the response size is capped at 16KB gzipped? That implies that there's already some kind of special handling for the voting responses.
        southerntofu 7y ago
        From what i can see, the response only contains the comment you upvoted and its children. It's important for people like me who don't have Javascript, but the JS voting system could probably do with a simple HEAD request.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    > How could it possibly be considered a good thing? It will work with any possible browser under any reasonably foreseeable condition with no maintenance on the part of the HN crew. > I bet that they'd see a significant drop in resource usage solely by not generating entire comments pages just to throw them away every time anyone votes on a comment. If there is a serious performance problem they will presumably do some analysis and make changes related to the most serious bottleneck. > There are multiple downsides There are multiple irrelevant hypotheticals. If anyone cares about the heavy-weight HN, I hope they don't accidentally click the link to the article and discover the wider internet with images and whatnot.
drusepth 7y ago
Comparing to Facebook is probably the worst possible comparison, though, and doesn't seem representative of most other sites.
- GoblinSlayer 7y ago
  Only a very few sites are not bloated Facebook clone abominations.
neop1x 7y ago
True. And I can see that some webs gradually stop working if you are using JS blockers. For example Aliexpress used to work fine with uMatrix. Now, if I click on the Next page in the paginator, it behaves like it loaded the next page, jumps to top, but it didn't - it just changed URL location. So I have to CTRL+R to reload the whole page to force their server-side rendering. I know it is theoretically my problem but I have to use JS blocking to stop (for me useless) ads and malware scripts. If they just loaded content from their domain or sub-domains, it would work perfectly fine. And if it were old-school server-rendered website, it would probably work faster, as it was discussed here some time ago. I have a feeling that web devs are sometimes over-engineering it. Web browser is HTML viewer, not an operating system.