4 ms·

Disclaimer: I am not a programmer or web guy. Would this technology be beneficial to Hacker News? Is the site currently hosted on a SPDY-compatible server?

i386 15y ago
Its only for Rack based apps (Ruby) and this website is written in pg's own lisp-like language. So, no :)
- MikeCapone 15y ago
  Maybe I'm confused; I thought SPDY was a HTTP replacement written by Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY
  - SpikeGronim 15y ago
    Yes, SPDY is a cross-platform protocol. This submission is a Ruby implementation of a SPDY server for Rack applications like Ruby on Rails. The news.ycombinator.com server is written in the arc language. SPDY is awesome.
    - MikeCapone 15y ago
      Ok. It's my fault for not being clear in my original message. I wasn't talking about the linked SPDY implementation but about SPDY in general. Sorry, I should have marked it as OT.
      - i386 15y ago
        All good - we are all here to share knowledge :-)
stingraycharles 15y ago
No, HN is currently using the regular HTTP protocol. In my opinion, the costs of implementing SPDY support, at the moment, outweigh the benefits of that support.
wmf 15y ago
SPDY benefits pages that make many requests (lots of CSS, JS, images, etc.); HN doesn't have any of that so no.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  I don't know why, but I find HN pretty slow for a page that only shows 30 links. Engadget takes about half the time to load. Granted this is with Adblock and WidgetBlock, which I use to block all 3rd party connections besides Disqus, but HN doesn't use any of that anyway, so it's still strange.
  - forgotusername 15y ago
    HN does no output buffering, causing rendering time to often be closer to 5 seconds than 100ms in Europe. This is trivial to fix, but I guess the SFO crowd don't feel the pain so it probably never will. Edit: nope, that's not it. Using the fastest UK machine with clean net available to me, tcpdump never shows more than 1 unacked packet on the wire at any time, gzip is turned off, and keepalive is turned off. Gzipping the 24k home page drops it to 4.3k. None of this really accounts for the crazy jitter we see in Europe while rendering the main table.
    - EwanToo 15y ago
      Sat in the UK I don't see anything like a 5 second render time for HN, maybe 1 second at most. For me: The top half of the page draws instantly in Chrome, then the bottom half. In firefox, the page draws incrementally, line by line. In IE9, the whole page draws pretty much instantly, much quicker than FF or Chrome for me.
resnamen 15y ago
Wouldn't fix all the "unknown or expired links"!
- dextorious 15y ago
  Well, re: speed and lack of bugs, HN is really not the best showcase for functional languages in web programming...

i386 15y ago

Its only for Rack based apps (Ruby) and this website is written in pg's own lisp-like language. So, no :)

MikeCapone 15y ago
Maybe I'm confused; I thought SPDY was a HTTP replacement written by Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY
- SpikeGronim 15y ago
  Yes, SPDY is a cross-platform protocol. This submission is a Ruby implementation of a SPDY server for Rack applications like Ruby on Rails. The news.ycombinator.com server is written in the arc language. SPDY is awesome.
  - MikeCapone 15y ago
    Ok. It's my fault for not being clear in my original message. I wasn't talking about the linked SPDY implementation but about SPDY in general. Sorry, I should have marked it as OT.
    - i386 15y ago
      All good - we are all here to share knowledge :-)

stingraycharles 15y ago

No, HN is currently using the regular HTTP protocol. In my opinion, the costs of implementing SPDY support, at the moment, outweigh the benefits of that support.

wmf 15y ago

SPDY benefits pages that make many requests (lots of CSS, JS, images, etc.); HN doesn't have any of that so no.

nextparadigms 15y ago
I don't know why, but I find HN pretty slow for a page that only shows 30 links. Engadget takes about half the time to load. Granted this is with Adblock and WidgetBlock, which I use to block all 3rd party connections besides Disqus, but HN doesn't use any of that anyway, so it's still strange.
- forgotusername 15y ago
  HN does no output buffering, causing rendering time to often be closer to 5 seconds than 100ms in Europe. This is trivial to fix, but I guess the SFO crowd don't feel the pain so it probably never will. Edit: nope, that's not it. Using the fastest UK machine with clean net available to me, tcpdump never shows more than 1 unacked packet on the wire at any time, gzip is turned off, and keepalive is turned off. Gzipping the 24k home page drops it to 4.3k. None of this really accounts for the crazy jitter we see in Europe while rendering the main table.
  - EwanToo 15y ago
    Sat in the UK I don't see anything like a 5 second render time for HN, maybe 1 second at most. For me: The top half of the page draws instantly in Chrome, then the bottom half. In firefox, the page draws incrementally, line by line. In IE9, the whole page draws pretty much instantly, much quicker than FF or Chrome for me.

resnamen 15y ago

Wouldn't fix all the "unknown or expired links"!

dextorious 15y ago
Well, re: speed and lack of bugs, HN is really not the best showcase for functional languages in web programming...