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Someone asked the other day "How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34001410 https://news.ycombinator.com/

Someone asked the other day "How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34001410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34001410) so obviously someone is now trying to figure out how to work around it, and it seems they succeeded! Or, it's just busy :) I think the software in general have problems with long/deeply nested comment chains so maybe having a few of those being popular is enough to bring things to a halt. By the way, you can usually work around performance issues on HN by either logging out (removing cookies if it doesn't load) or using incognito mode/private window (being logged out) as then the software can just serve cache views instead of having to fetch data on each navigation. Edit: from the almighty dang: > I've moved that one off the front page, partly because these are more or less the same story, but mostly because the traffic on this is boiling our poor server and I need to resort to tricks. Sorry all! From "Twitter Suspends PG's Account" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044525 Seems Elon Musk/Twitter is the one to blame for HN being slow right now.

ttyyzz 4y ago
>I think the software in general have problems with long/deeply nested comment chains nah, look at twitter for example! i don't think that's the reason of HN being slow/not responding..
- fathyb 4y ago
  Twitter generally limits threads to < 20 replies, you need to click a button to see more. Large HN threads have 200+ replies.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I don't mean in the sense of "this is a hard problem in computer science" but more "the specific software that runs HN (Arc) haven't been optimized for this". That there is pagination on the comment thread is something that was added as a stopgap to prevent the issue from being even worse. At one point, HN was almost unusable as lots of comment threads hit the limit, so they added the pagination thing while trying to figure out how to solve it properly. I'm sure if you search for "by:dang pagination" or something similar you can find more information about it.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Yeah... aside from Hacker News running on a single threaded server, the language it runs in isn't very efficient, and the application uses text files and RAM rather than a relational database, so scalability and data synchronization are always an issue. It's great for what it is but pg's application design philosophy seems to have stopped at "macros go brrrr" so it has definite limits as well.

ttyyzz 4y ago

>I think the software in general have problems with long/deeply nested comment chains nah, look at twitter for example! i don't think that's the reason of HN being slow/not responding..

fathyb 4y ago
Twitter generally limits threads to < 20 replies, you need to click a button to see more. Large HN threads have 200+ replies.
capableweb 4y ago
I don't mean in the sense of "this is a hard problem in computer science" but more "the specific software that runs HN (Arc) haven't been optimized for this". That there is pagination on the comment thread is something that was added as a stopgap to prevent the issue from being even worse. At one point, HN was almost unusable as lots of comment threads hit the limit, so they added the pagination thing while trying to figure out how to solve it properly. I'm sure if you search for "by:dang pagination" or something similar you can find more information about it.
- krapp 4y ago
  Yeah... aside from Hacker News running on a single threaded server, the language it runs in isn't very efficient, and the application uses text files and RAM rather than a relational database, so scalability and data synchronization are always an issue. It's great for what it is but pg's application design philosophy seems to have stopped at "macros go brrrr" so it has definite limits as well.