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Warning to YC applicants: We're going to restart HN tonight
So if you're editing your YC application in the application form (which I wouldn't recommend anyway), click regularly on the Save button at the bottom of the page.
We restart HN every 5 or 6 days, or it gets slow (memory leaks). Usually we do it at night and don't say anything about it, but since people might be editing YC applications, I thought I'd better issue a warning.
I haven't said when we're going to restart it, because I don't know. It shouldn't matter anyway; just don't depend on it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- someone13 14y agoOut of sheer curiosity, is the restart a manual thing, or is it just on a cronjob? I'm thinking by the wording of the OP, it's done manually, but I'm still going to ask :-)
- pg 14y agoI do it manually.
- stephenyoung 14y agoWouldn't want it any other way.
- drp4929 14y agoHow do you know it has crossed slowness threshold to prompt restart ? I check HN couple of times a day and I have not felt any performance difference.
- TheMakeA 14y agoZapier sends him a notification of course... ;)
- dpe82 14y agoOut of curiosity, why not have it restart automatically every couple days at like 4am? One less thing to worry about...
- duck 14y agoThen you have one more thing to worry about - whether the server/service is going to come back online. :)
- smartwater 14y agoIf it was on a cronjob, he would know precisely what time the server reboots.
- ohlol 14y agoyou assume a very primitive logic. but, given the primitive subject, i can't disagree.
- blhack 14y agoI love the informality of this post. Just "hey, guys, we're gonna flick the lights on and off sometime tonight; just a heads up in case you're working on something." Never change, HN.
- JabavuAdams 14y agoYeah, you never really know how the sausage is made. You can watch all these videos and conference presentations of our-awesome-system-to-ensure-super-duper-scalable-uptime, spend hours debating this or that architecture, and generally be less productive than if you just kick the box in the right place, every so often.
- adgar2 14y agoYeah... writing a site as simple as HN that doesn't fall over in a week isn't rocket science.
- sgdesign 14y agoThis is seriously misinformed. You have no idea what goes into making a site "as simple as HN", and I very much doubt you would be able to write one in a month, let alone a week.
- adgar2 14y agoPlease list your assumptions about what ideas I have - since you're clearly assuming I don't work for a company that knows how to write websites that scale. Edit: I find it adorable that you all think HN is a hard site to run. Good luck breaking 200 qps.
- orangethirty 14y agoEdit: I find it adorable that you all think HN is a hard site to run. Good luck breaking 200 qps. It is a hard site to run due to its audience. Realize that this site gets poked around by hundreds of hackers. All trying to learn or break the system. Trying to not get your ass handed to you with a commonly language/framework is hard enough. I can't fathom how they do it with an experimental language and libraries. Though they are Lisp hackers. If anyone can do it, its a Lisper...
- ojiikun 14y agoMemory leaks? If you're in the market for a Performance and Availability engineer with 15 years' experience in making this sort of problem a happily-fading horror story, send me a message. ;)
- bengl3rt 14y agoIt's written in Arc, which is written in Racket... you might find yourself coming up against the limitations of tools which were designed by academics, for academics and never meant to be used in a production site.
- nicholassmith 14y agoPlus I'm sure I've seen pg say somewhere it runs reasonably well now, and when it starts going they flick the switch and bring it back up.
- kenko 14y agoDoes the racket-lang website have to be restarted every so often?
- Locke1689 14y agoRacket is open source. Have at it. http://racket-lang.org http://racket-lang.org Based on the last time I touched it, I suspect it's a managed memory leak, though. The vast majority of Racket is in racket/base or mzscheme.
- timothya 14y agoHow does the restarting affect people filling out the application form? As long as the restart happens between pressing the save button, would there be any problems? The only problem that I can forsee is if the save button is pressed while the server is restarting.
- JoelMcCracken 14y agoThe wonders of continuation-backed web development. Have you ever had an "unknown or expired link" issue on hn? Im pretty certain they are the same problem.
- TheMakeA 14y agoThanks for the heads up.
- jiggy2011 14y agoWow, it's scary enough writing a comment in HN without a copy in my paste buffer. You would be a very brave man to do your application straight up.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoBeen using http://getlazarus.com/download http://getlazarus.com/download for years - much happier!
- dgesang 14y agoWow, there really seams to be an addon for everything, even if they make a simple thing more complicated. Why don't you just copy your post before you hit the 'submit' button? Easier, faster, better?! FWIW: Use Ditto if you don't want to lose the previous buffer content.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago> Why don't you just copy your post before you hit the 'submit' button? Three simple (pragmatic) reasons: 1. Most of the time I forget. 2. Sometimes I'm writing multiple comments in HN and elsewhere simultaneously. And, sometimes I write quite long, carefully thought out comment on a forum I visit frequently, complete with images and all that (the forum runs phpBB and doesn't have a 'save draft' button). We need to change the web server before we can move to a better forum engine (vanilla, perhaps) and it's a small forum and doesn't worth the effort until we move the forum to another server later this year. 3. I usually use Safari betas (on OS X), and they're not famous for being stable and while the whole app rarely crashes, after they've moved to WebKit 2.0, occasionally something goes wrong and it has to refresh all open tabs and flush anything that's been in the text fields. So, even if I do #1, the danger is still there. :)
- JoshTriplett 14y agoBetter yet, copy the application questions to a text file, write your answers there, and when you get ready to submit your application, copy in the answers and hit "submit". You'll want to preserve a copy of your application for future reference anyway.
- tokenadult 14y agoBetter yet, copy the application questions to a text file, write your answers there, and when you get ready to submit your application, copy in the answers and hit "submit". When HN gets busy, that is also helpful for posting comments. Sometimes even when I type one of my shorter comments, by the time the comment is done and I select "reply," the response is "unknown link," a sign of a time-out condition. (I probably type slower than many programmers.) Fortunately, my browser preserves my form submission if I encounter that condition, so then I copy the whole comment and try again. Anything long that takes looking things up I compose in my text editor, and then paste in all at once (as for another reply I posted today).
- adgar2 14y ago> We restart HN every 5 or 6 days, or it gets slow (memory leaks). Because competence wasn't worth it a few hundred restarts ago and isn't worth it now.
- yozmsn 14y agoBecause trolls are the best way to make people laugh.
- viralbajaria 14y agoaahh!! now i know why my application submit button would work sometimes even after i had the browser open for a few hours. Now I know that whenever it didn't work I could have been a victim of this restart. thanks for the info.
- zheng 14y agoI'm not going to lie, I had a good laugh thanks to this post. Not that I fault the method being used to combat memory leaks. Depending on how much (of pg's) time a restart takes, this may be the most efficient way of handling it, but the idea that the site where we all discuss the finer points of multi-region-zone-datacenter replication redundancy just gets restarted when something isn't working correctly humors me.
- andrewljohnson 14y agoPretty sure the most efficient way of handling it would be to port the site to something that wasn't Arc. These problems exist because Hacker News is half science project, half production site.
- orangethirty 14y agoThat makes it cool.
- bane 14y agoThe best part is that it's becoming one of the more influential tech sites on the web now, kind of proving the point that hacking together something great (and NOW) can provide tremendous value to lots of people.
- sharkweek 14y agoI am a diehard HN fanboy, love the community, love getting my daily tech news here; but... anytime I want a good laugh I like to crack open the source code of Ycombinator's home page I mean... c'mon <table width=100% cellpadding=6 cellspacing=0> <tr><td bgcolor=#ffff88> <table width=100% cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0> <tr><td bgcolor=#ffff88>
- yuhong 14y agoYet the JS still uses getElementById!
- 14y ago
- ohlol 14y agodat computer science dat lisp dat dat
- Snapps 14y agoSocial news sharing FTW! I love how we can help others get this news simply through our engagement. Oh, and as for "editing your YC application in the application form" ...I wouldn't recommend it, either. Use something that doesn't require an internet connection, and save often. [Don't forget to actually fill out and submit your application, though. =]
- SeoxyS 14y agoI'm curious, does the use of continuations prevent HN from running multiple processes & from being load-balanced?
- irahul 14y ago> does the use of continuations prevent HN from running multiple processes & from being load-balanced? AFAIK HN doesn't use continuations, but closures. Something along the lines of(imitation of arc challenge in flask): https://gist.github.com/3998745 https://gist.github.com/3998745
- kjhughes 14y agoIf you restart while I'm in the middle of describing how my start-up simultaneously solves every problem from your frighteningly ambitious post, know now that I will NOT be retyping it.
- uuilly 14y agoWhat time are the applications due? It just says Nov 2. Should I assume just after 11:59 Nov 1st?
- etfb 14y agoSo hang on... you're telling me there are people who consider themselves geeks who don't use the Lazarus plugin (http://getlazarus.com/ http://getlazarus.com/) in Firefox? (Or an equivalent, but Lazarus was developed by a friend of mine, so I prefer it.) That's just weird.
- chacham15 14y agoIm sorry for my ignorance, but I dont understand how HN can have memory leaks. I learned Scheme in school and from what I remember memory is handled automatically (in the particular one we were studying I think it was via reference counting). Is Arc that different from Scheme or am I just completely unaware of how Lisp works behind the scenes?
- philwelch 14y agoGarbage collection is cruise control for memory management, but you still have to steer. The only thing GC gives you is automated cleanup of orphaned data; if you're sloppy about holding references you don't need anymore, the GC won't help you.