3 ms·

flat files, no database

• pg 16y ago
  That's not the bottleneck. Essentially there's an in-memory database (known as hash tables). Stuff is lazily loaded off disk into memory, but most of the frequently needed stuff is loaded once at startup. The bottleneck is the amount of garbage created by generating pages. IIRC there is some horrible inefficiency involving UTF-8 characters.
  • ezalor 16y ago
    > That's not the bottleneck. What is the main bottleneck of HN?
    • pg 16y ago
      See the second paragraph.
  • svlla 16y ago
    perhaps continuations could be used more judiciously as well
  • gills 16y ago
    Are you using any sort of in-memory fragment caching? That seems like it might reduce some render overhead.
    • pg 16y ago
      A great deal, and it does.