8 ms·
Ask HN: Why did HN just go down?
For a couple minutes, Hacker News was returning 502 Bad Gateway error codes with the message that "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!".
Any idea what happened?
- jmmv 5y agoI noticed that as well, and also saw a similar "blackout" a few days ago that lasted longer. First time ever in years... so wondering if something has changed / is changing on their side.
- Thorentis 5y agoSame for me! It is now working but seems a bit degraded in terms of response time.
- theandrewbailey 5y agoEvery week or so, HN will give me that error, but it's almost always back in a few minutes. I don't really think that much about it, sometimes we all have bad days.
- tapanjk 5y agoWeekly reboot cron kicked in? #joking
- krnlpnc 5y agoThe gateway must have went bad and then got good again
- swarnie 5y agoI thought i recognised your username, you must work for my networking team.
- fortran77 5y agoMy theory: The admins were trimming a whole bunch of submissions about Musk's takeover that all appeared at once, to try to force everything into one mega-thread submission. Everyone saw the news/tweet and rushed to HN to be the one who picks up all those precious HN karma points! In any event, don't worry about it! There are other sites on the internet.
- mritchie712 5y agogood theory, would be interested why that'd cause a 502 though
- notreallyserio 5y agoI think it means there were 502 duplicate submissions. We're down to only 200 so it should be smooth from here on out.
- gwbas1c 5y ago> In any event, don't worry about it! There are other sites on the internet. Any suggestions? Sometimes I peek back at Slashdot. Otherwise Hacker News is my goto aggregator.
- jermaustin1 5y agoHappens almost every day for me, but I basically live on this site. It will usually only last 10-15 seconds, some as long as 2 minutes.
- vorpalhex 5y agoUsually the megathreads cause it.
- sidcool 5y agoElon Musk buying Twitter thread probably.
- fatih-erikli 5y agoScaling a tree structured view is difficult as hell. Elon musk thread shows just one single comment, and "view 557 more comments" button. I guess it's because of the number of comments written for the first comment. I would expect to see other threads in the news detail page, not only one, but probably it's some sort of optimization to handle enormous amount of comments. I guess the twitter's way of handling huge threads is much more scalable and I think twitter's acquisition should had such a point.
- mkl 5y ago> Scaling a tree structured view is difficult has hell. Really? Why is that? It doesn't seem like that should be the case here. HN threads are only a few hundred comments, and the web page structure is very linear and formulaic (the threads do not form a tree in the DOM). I.e. it's a depth-first traversal visiting children by ranking, each comment producing a row in a table. For just a few hundred comments I would expect that to be very fast (but I don't know what data structure it's all stored in).
- fatih-erikli 5y ago[1] It's not easy to determine how many root-level comments should be shown in the first page. You need to count sub-comments as well, and second level comments should have loaded as "expanded", it's also not easy to decide how many second level comments should be shown as expanded. The amount of them could be 10 and 100 or 1000. So if you just say like "10" comments, the letters in just one comment could be worth of 100 comments. So you also need a "show more" button for each comment exceeds some character limit. If you do a viewport optimization, you need to calculate the rendered size of a comment section and request only comments visible for the browser viewport. That's why it's difficult. * Elon Mush threads shows only one thread now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061 Edit: Looks like it is no longer an issue. It shows latest comments.
- znpy 5y agoDidn’t you hear? Musk has launched an hostile takeover of hacker news too! /s
- mattbrewsbytes 5y agoThe musk fan base (and detractors) are going wild trying to discuss his actions about twtr and probably overloaded hn.
- incomingpain 5y agoHappens multiple times a day I've noticed.
- 8K832d7tNmiQ 5y agoChances are there's not enough load balancers to handle sudden traffic spike, probably.
- IncRnd 5y agoI imagine it was crushed by the Mush traffic.
- drakonka 5y agoI saw this for the first time last week and have since gotten this several times. Often opening the site in Incognito mode "fixes" it, but I would not expect a Bad Gateway error to returned in case of any user-specific throttling or anything so I put it down to a coincidence.
- dang 5y agoYou're all correct.