7 ms·
Ask HN: Is HN slow for you lately? Or even not responding?
For the past month or so, HN has been getting slower and slower. Do you experience that? A few minutes ago it was not even responding.
- ErrantX 18y agoYes it was "dead" for me for a few minutes just now
- gojomo 18y agoYes. In fact, I noticed problems increasing around the time of PG's 2009-01-15 "Faster" news.
- kmt 18y agoExactly. It was not faster for me but slower. I didn't report it though, because my own connection was unstable at the time (I was playing with asterisk and my LAN).
- TrevorJ 18y agoI tried to respond to you, but it 404'd you which was ironic. Yes, it does seem a bit janky today.
- jacquesm 18y agoIt crashes every couple of hours and then takes a few seconds to minutes to come back up. I've just been playing around with the source code to see if I could figure out why it would lose the port, but the only thing I can think of is if the whole mzscheme process dies, otherwise it would just hang while trying to connect and it doesn't do that.
- pg 18y agoIt's running out of memory. The half million or so of HN comments and stories no longer all fit in memory at once. This is not in itself a problem. We only load stuff as needed, and only crawlers ever look at the older stuff. But it does mean that eventually (currently after a day or so) we run out of space and the server crashes and restarts. I'm working on a less crude version of garbage collection.
- jhawk28 18y agoI guess you don't need to worry about all that complicated fragmentation with the current GC. :)
- jacquesm 18y agoIt's a great scalability test then! Memory is cheap, so that should not be a really big issue then, 32G of ram in a server is nothing special these days. Unless of course you're already maxed out, then it is a different issue. How big is the working set of HN ?
- pg 18y agoWe're maxed out on the current server.
- brk 18y agoYes, that has been occurring frequently for me. Many times when it hangs for me, I seem to get the "static" parts of the page (title, upper bar) and as soon as the dynamic parts would be expected to load it hangs or times out or goes very slowly.
- pg 18y agoThe computation for the orange usernames was destroying performance. Not directly, but because it caused a lot of stuff to get loaded from disk that would not otherwise have been. So I've temporarily turned the feature off till I can write a more efficient version.
- Shamiq 18y agoDo you mind posting the current code for it? I'm sure some of us would love to give optimization a shot.
- palish 18y agoOptimizing a program via messageboard would be like writing a program by mail.
- pg 18y agoI appreciate the offer, but it's not the kind of optimization that consists of taking one chunk of code and making it faster. The answer will consist of several little changes spread out throughout the code.
- tlrobinson 18y agoIt seems like it is something that could be computed once every few hours and cached without affecting the experience.
- jonursenbach 18y agoHow come you just didn't do the computations as a background process and let it run when each new comment comes in?
- Shamiq 18y agoPG: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468585 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468585 Maybe that'll help. Edit: Paul's post here made that link irrelevant.
- shergill 18y agoWe have been discovered!!!
- raamdev 18y agoYes, not responding at random times.
- jwesley 18y agoAnyone else feel the site is getting too self referential? I noticed the lag as well, but is this worthy of a devoted thread taking up space on the first page? The recent surge in self referential threads has felt Reddit-esque.
- mattmaroon 18y agoI completely agree. It's been getting that way for too long, and it's half the reason I check the site less frequently lately. I don't need to see a Happy New Year post here. It's cliche and unnecessary. Polls about which text editor people use are the same, because they're just going to be repeated by newbies every few months. My opinion is that self-posts should be on a separate page, by themselves.
- profgubler 18y agoI think the reason you get so many repeated posts from newbies, is that HN does not have a search feature. I think simplly adding a google search to HN would likely cut down on this issue.
- zain 18y agohttp://searchyc.com/ http://searchyc.com/
- rw 18y agoSearchYC is often really slow, at least for me. The page loading times are on the order of tens of seconds. HN needs its own minimalist search engine designed to search for submissions.
- parenthesis 18y agoI do find it very useful, though. I hope the guys behind it will get around to making it faster some time.
- davidw 18y agoI've had trouble when I clicked on 'submissions' for a while, and now even 'threads' is getting pretty slow.
- jansson 18y agoNope, it's working fine towards me.
- geuis 18y agoYes, mainly when viewing my profile page.
- fauigerzigerk 18y agoThe "threads" page is very slow for me but the front page is actually faster than it was a few weeks ago.
- donniefitz2 18y agoIt's seems plenty fast to me. I'm on slow connection and I get snappy page loads.
- zandorg 18y agoYes, sometimes it doesn't load, shows a blank page. I wonder if it's seeing malware from my machine, but clearly not given other eyewitness accounts.
- corgan1003 18y agoyup, did not load for 20 minutes just now
- Rabidmonkey1 18y agoI haven't had any trouble with it.
- ilamont 18y agoYes. This morning around 9 or 10 (eastern) it was slow -- took many tens of second for indivual links or the main page to come up. But it seems to be recent -- I can't recall it happening before this week.
- Andys 18y agoARC doesn't scale!
- walesmd 18y agoIt's the orange names :) Yes, I've noticed a lot of slowdown as well, primarily when viewing comments.
- jmtame 18y agothe site feels like it's slowing down a lot, and this is even after the highlight name feature was removed. you guys read what happened when google made the tweaks to display more results right?
- rw 18y agoDear everyone: Stop meta-referencing - go make something.