7 ms·
Why HN Got Slow
We got MSMed. The post about baseball bat sales in the UK was the perfect media bait and they all linked to the item page.
I turned on comment thread pagination to decrease the load. I'll turn it off tonight.
- jbseek 15y agoThanks PG, you must wear many hats.
- LearnYouALisp 15y agoWhat ever it is, it's always a white one. ("Yeaaaaah") I was looking at [a list of hats](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat) recently, by the way.
- melling 15y agoAny time to address the endless number of reposts and the increase in volume of submissions?
- benologist 15y agoI'd like to see accounts that only submit the same site over and over again and don't otherwise participate penalized. That'd clear up the 'new' list a lot as well as dampen the duplicate submissions.
- hoodoof 15y agoForgive my lack of worldliness but what is "MSMed"?
- stevenp 15y agoMain-stream media.
- shadowmatter 15y agoMainstream media'd. Meaning someone from the mainstream media posted a link to that post, and the surge in traffic made everything slow.
- samstave 15y agoSlashdotted Digged Reddited Pick one
- mainguy 15y agoI was searching on google trying to figure this out myself...
- fname 15y agoLink to the article? nm, here it is: http://www.pcworld.com/article/237616/baseball_bat_sales_rise_on_amazon_uk.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/237616/baseball_bat_sales_ris...
- InfinityX0 15y agoCrazy that a site such as PCWorld could bog down a site as popular (or so it seemed) as Hacker News. Goes to show what kind of a small fish Hacker News is in a much bigger pond..
- JoeCortopassi 15y agoI think you missed the point. What happened, was everyone (actual news organizations) linked to HN because the top link had a "scandalous" title. This wasn't because of a link from PCWorld
- ehsanu1 15y agoWell, I'd be surprised too if it was just due to PCWorld, but it's more than that. The guardian and the telegraph, and many other mainstream news outlets have gotten wind of this story: http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=baseball+bat+amazon&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest#q=baseball+bat+amazon&hl=en&client=opera&hs=h4x&rls=en&channel=suggest&prmd=ivnsu&source=lnms&tbm=nws&ei=gtdBToDGBYHu0gGsmvy-CQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=4&ved=0CBUQ_AUoAw&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=2e0b124d14493641&biw=1364&bih=635 http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=b...
- InfinityX0 15y agoAh, I was using Yahoo! Site Explorer as a judge.. which only showed PCWorld. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGk.jo20FOKxgAdjLal8kF?p=news.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D2864557&fr=sfp&bwm=i http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGk.jo20F...
- jerrya 15y agoWe got MSMed. The post about baseball bat sales in the UK was the perfect media bait and they all linked to the item page. Hmm. The past 48 hours a lot of sites have been slow for me: HN, Salon, FARK, ... I figured I was getting Cox'd. http://cox.com http://cox.com
- Vexenon 15y agoI was wondering why the load times have been ridiculously long. Also: I've been getting Cox'd as well the past three or so days. Maybe I should complain, or something.
- jerrya 15y agofyi, cox has their own local speed tests which can be informative as to where the hangup might be. The local one to me is: http://azspeedtest.cox.com/ http://azspeedtest.cox.com/ It's actually somewhat frustrating to see that register phenomenal speeds when the web past their internal routers seems ... buffering ... buffering.
- kleeg 15y agoI figured I was getting Cox'd That's what she said... I noticed the same with Fark as well. Also HuffPo.
- loire280 15y agoCable providers provide terrible DNS service. You may notice a big difference in performance by changing your DNS settings to http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/ http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/ or http://www.opendns.com/ http://www.opendns.com/. As a bonus, I've noticed that many service interruptions are DNS failures, not routing issues.
- blinkingled 15y agoAbsolutely - change the DNS _and_ put something like DD-WRT on your router with dnsmasq as the local caching proxy server. Nothing beats that per Steve Gibson's DNS benchmark!
- pitdesi 15y agoInteresting that that post itself (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2864557 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2864557) is now on the 2nd page despite having 400some upvotes in the past 7 hours (odd because there are several posts with many less votes in a similar timeframe on the homepage). Does that happen due to being flagged too many times or some other reason?
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoSpeculation: there is an authority metric which is used as a strong quality indicator. If you're considered an authority then your vote counts a lot more. 7 votes from folks like patio11 counts for about a million votes by the likes of me. Like I said, speculation.
- zobzu 15y agoI'm wondering also if some who down vote get a bigger down vote ratio. usually i lose points 1 by 1 and sometimes i just reload and lose 10 or more. Or that's cache. ;-) And yeah I've strong opinions so while sometimes i get crazy upvotes I also get crazy downvotes hehe.
- graywh 15y agoThere's no down voting on articles. And for karma, 1 vote = 1 point.
- alex_c 15y agoI'm pretty sure it has to do with flagging. (that, as well, is speculation combined with personal observation).
- niels_olson 15y agoWould norvig be on the list? aaronsw? I keep meaning to build a list of celebrity CS people on HN. Anybody already got one?
- 15y ago
- rdl 15y agoWill we have International Haskell Day later this week?
- Locke1689 15y agoNow there's a joke for the old-timers.
- nitrogen 15y agoThose front pages filled with articles on relatively obscure programming languages are actually what got me to start reading HN.
- dschoon 15y agoYou know, I still have a 50-odd Erlang article queue. So I'm not saying I want every day to be Haskell Day, but I'm also not saying I'd be terribly upset if I had a few hundred articles on Haskell to keep me warm at night...
- niels_olson 15y agoWhat do you use for this queue? I can't possibly keep up with all the reading I come across, and often just relegate it to Readability, Instapaper, Delicious, Xmarks, etc. Would be very interested to hear how someone else handles this.
- bluehat 15y agoI have a historical Erlang article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2866337 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2866337
- Joakal 15y agoPG, can you do the complimentary blog post "Well, these are my statistics to HN before and after getting MSM'd"
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jvehent 15y agoI'd be curious to see some numbers. Just for fun, and also to get an idea of the amount of visitors that kind of link can bring. Capacity planning, they say :)
- dennisgorelik 15y agoCan caching help?
- kunley 15y agoLooks like HN has now some focus of link spammers.. see recent submissions.