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And HackerNews seems to be much faster as soon as FB is back up. Not sure if this is just me.
by tracyhenry 5y ago
And HackerNews seems to be much faster as soon as FB is back up. Not sure if this is just me.
- Wistar 5y agoYes. This seems to me to be true.
- actusual 5y agoI'm experiencing this as well.
- itslennysfault 5y agoProbably Facebook trackers. I noticed a lot of apps (including my own) having major slowness on initial load while they were down. My assumption is it was their tracking code timing out.
- tempestn 5y agoIt was probably due to the global DNS system being overloaded due to people and apps repeatedly retrying facebook connections. Cloudflare reported 30x normal DNS requests for FB properties. https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
- tekromancr 5y agoBut HN doesn't have any facebook trackers
- mandmandam 5y agoI wonder how sure we can be of that.
- Renaud 5y agoHit F12 on your browser and look at the network traffic. HN only loads a handful of files: the html page, a style sheet, a JavaScript file and a few GIFs for the arrows and faveicon. The JS is uncompressed and very readable. It only contains logic for site use, no code to call back some other trackers. A perfect example of site that doesn't need to use client-side analytics to sell ads.
- mandmandam 5y agoCool, cool. Try using your imagination though.
- artificial 5y agoWell, these days server side api… er Conversions API is the way to go. This way if the user blocks the browser pixel the data can still be acquired for certain events, say a purchase. Google Tag Manager server side has something similar.
- elromulous 5y agoTrue for me as well. What would explain this? Does hn use some tracking from FB? Not trying to throw shade, but this is a surprising correlation.
- joshmanders 5y agoAll the devices on the planet with Facebook owned apps installed having no concept of backoff retries and people constantly refreshing trying to figure out why Facebook isn't loading was pegging the crap out of DNS resolvers, slowing down queries for other legitimate requests too. Once they came back online and their DNS was resolving, it alleviated all that pressure.
- leoc 5y agoCould it just be people pounding HN for any update on Facebook?
- rightbyte 5y agoMaybe HN servers share room with something that got pinned down with requests when FB was down? E.g. 100000s of devices doing a login retry loop for some app since FB auth. doesn't work, or something.
- renaudg 5y agoDNS resolvers worldwide being bombarded with retries from clients trying to reach FB.
- 5y ago
- paganel 5y agoNo, you're not the only one, I noticed the same thing. In fact, immediately after reading and checking that FB is up I came back to the HN tab, reload it and it was way faster compared to a few minutes ago when FB was still down.
- EGreg 5y agoTelegram was down for me too WhatsApp is still down Something else is actually going on…
- Bud 5y agoThat doesn't mean something else is going on. It means that there are a lot of us who are web addicts who were temporarily deprived of our Zucker-smack and desperately flailed about in the rest of the web for a fix until our main dose got restored. As for WhatsApp, that is of course a FB property.
- EGreg 5y agoI'm still thinking it's BGP poisoning of some top platforms... no one really knows what's going on, but BGP isn't byzantine fault tolerant https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/10/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-and-oculus-are-down-heres-what-we-know/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/10/faceb...
- shuntress 5y agoOnce it came back people stopped mashing refresh on the related HN threads.
- Justin_K 5y agoSame.... was it a global DNS issue or was HN overloaded from everybody looking for updates?
- Macha 5y agoSurely the moment facebook comes back up would be higher traffic as people rush to comment on it (see this thread's rapid rise). Best guess: there's a DNS dependency in HN's critical path somewhere and the DNS server they used was being hammered with the facebook dns lookup retries.
- sulam 5y agoNah, unauthenticated HN was working very fast. It was simply the amount of traffic HN got while FB was down. Here's a crazy idea: maybe a lot of HN people also spend time on FB during the day. When FB was down, they had more time to spend on HN!
- elzbardico 5y agoLots of facebook employees with nothing to do. We have this impression of HN being a huge internet property because of the importance of the news here in our lives, but in the great scheme of things, probably it has pretty modest traffic. 60.000 more people hammering it probably is a good load.
- tempestn 5y agoFrom a cloudflare blog post on this, their public DNS resolvers were getting 30x their usual traffic. Presumably that was the case for DNS resolvers everywhere, so that would explain a slowdown: > But that's not all. Now human behavior and application logic kicks in and causes another exponential effect. A tsunami of additional DNS traffic follows. > This happened in part because apps won't accept an error for an answer and start retrying, sometimes aggressively, and in part because end-users also won't take an error for an answer and start reloading the pages, or killing and relaunching their apps, sometimes also aggressively. ... > So now, because Facebook and their sites are so big, we have DNS resolvers worldwide handling 30x more queries than usual and potentially causing latency and timeout issues to other platforms. https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/ Edit: Although looking at the graph on that page, it appears that only DNS requests for FB properties increased 30x, so that last sentence appears to be misleading. Regardless, a significant overall increase.
- desertraven 5y agoPerhaps more people visiting HN during the Facebook blackout?
- teruakohatu 5y agoYes, from New Zealand it is now normal speed.
- chrisstanchak 5y agoThe packets were piling up at the fork in the river