7 ms·
Why HN is slow lately
We've had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.
You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter.
- amichail 18y agoIt would be interesting to know what is the likely reason for each traffic spike. Perhaps you could have a page that shows this information in a way similar to the Google finance news items: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG
- aaronblohowiak 18y agoI'd wager it is due to Stack Overflow's recent article.
- moe 18y agoStill I'm curious, what's the underlying problem? 33k/day doesn't sound like a lot of traffic, honestly. But also I can't imagine lisp being that slow either. Maybe add some caching?
- aaronblohowiak 18y agoIf I remember correctly, Arc is an ongoing experiment in language design, not high-performance implementation.
- jcl 18y agoAnd it's running on top of PLT Scheme, which adds another layer of interpretation.
- gnaritas 18y agoAnd it's running as a single process on a single server without a database storing everything on the file system. That it's doing the traffic it is I find quite impressive.
- pg 18y agoIn 2 GB of memory.
- gnaritas 18y agoYou know I'd love to see a writeup of the issues and challenges you've faced with this persistence strategy as the site grew. You know, more details of what you decided to lazy load, why, and how, and the impact it had. Technically speaking, I find hacker news persistent strategy one of the most interesting things about the implementation. I use a similar strategy for my blog and just playing with larger datasets I've certainly run into hard limits on what seems to be acceptable.
- lsb 18y agoExtrapolating from the memory-growth graph, how much time would a 16GB ram machine buy you?
- jwilliams 18y agoI'd have thought that most of HN's traffic is on the front page, and it's associated comments. I could well be wrong - But given this I'd have thought 2GB was plenty, and wasn't the bottleneck.
- jwilliams 18y agoOk maybe not: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512801 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512801
- brk 18y agoUpstream. Both ways. In the snow.
- jacquesm 18y ago33k users per day is piddly little bits. I think that a platform change is called for, the current recipe is clearly no longer up to the task. Which is a pity, because the lisp code really is quite elegant. It's just that the web and high performance and lisp are not usually used in a single sentence (other than this one...).
- thepanister 18y agoDid you add the word "many" on the saved list, instead of the number of saved stories, for performance tuning? women who create sites to get hired by Twitter Well, I thought of flagging this story, but I saw everyone is interested in discussing it! Anyway, HN is really slow since the last week, and it's being down for 4 to 5 times daily - for me. But when I ping 67.15.104.17 , it works fine. Maybe killing the spam automatically should help? I am not sure.
- Steve0 18y agoI'm off to upmod some boring stories.
- spooneybarger 18y agoupmod the what web frameworks are missing. snoooze.
- jasonlbaptiste 18y agoDone. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512178 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512178
- axod 18y agoEver considered just shutting the door to new registrations at peak times to throttle growth? or at least only allowing new members that have been invited from existing members? I've seen some really whacky comments the last week or so.
- ph0rque 18y agoAn invite-only strategy might actually backfire and make the site even hotter (see gmail, etc), although it will be interesting if the feature only turns on at certain times/due to certain conditions.
- axod 18y agoI'd say the most irritating could be people who: * See link to HN somewhere, follow it * Sign up, post some lame comments, never come back. So my thought was just adding some sort of barrier to sign up, to deter some of the people who only want to sign up so they can post a pun or some other non-HN worthy comment. (NB. This is only a hypothesis, I don't know how many people sign up post a few lame comments and never return).
- timtrueman 18y agoWould a delay between when you sign up and when you can do anything with the account help?
- markessien 18y agoA 1 day comment ban after sign-up would be more effective I think.
- apalmblad 18y agoPerhaps, but that might affect lurkers (perhaps even long term lurkers) who finally decide they have something useful to say and want to say it - now. I tend to mostly lurk, but I did find myself in that situation a couple weeks ago.
- 18y ago
- arien 18y agoI see people took the Erlang suggestion seriously :P But I wonder, isn't it a bit silly.. I mean, new people will read this post and find out your evil plans to kic.. err, gracefully lead them out :)
- eob 18y agoif they were going to stick around anyway, then its worth it for the comedy factor alone.
- ojbyrne 18y agoI feel the urge to twitter/blog that second paragraph, because it's funny. Must...refrain...
- davi 18y agoYou can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring I wouldn't mind if, in the service of this cause, the editors killed more fluffy stories.
- colins_pride 18y agoOr just give high-karma users the ability to down-vote submissions that have more than 30 points. The 30 points limit makes sure that stories don't get killed for the wrong reasons. In fact they don't get killed at all, they just get moved down the page a little faster than they otherwise would.
- Eliezer 18y agoThis sounds like a really really good idea.
- jauco 18y agoAre the new viewers gone yet?
- haasted 18y agoSeems like submitting boring Erlang stories immediately turned into a meme. First one on HN?
- unalone 18y agoFirst one I remember, anyway. As much as I like being pompous and saying HN should try not to go into decline, this one I'm happy about. It was all a joke on PG, it had a terrific effect on the stories here in a way that was instantly noticeable here, and it was actually pretty funny. Now we just make sure this fades quickly enough that a month from now nobody thinks they're "trendy" for mentioning Erlang Week.
- kirubakaran 18y agoHN's first meme : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98435 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98435 [421 days ago]
- mhyrr 18y agoUntil I read this, I wondered about the sudden popularity of Erlang
- bgutierrez 18y agoSame here. I couldn't fathom why Erlang would be that hot of a topic all of the sudden.
- cake 18y agoErlang, the next Ruby On Rails ?
- buro9 18y agoDamn, and here I was about to throw out all of that code I'd written and to jump on the Erlang bandwagon lest I be left behind.
- pg 18y agoOk, ok, enough Erlang submissions. You guys are like the crowdsourced version of one of those troublesome overliteral genies. I meant more that it would be better not to submit and upvote the fluffier type of link. Without those we'll be fine.
- icey 18y agoThis place was starting to look like λchan, thanks for putting the cork back on it.
- alecco 18y agoCan that request to skim the fluffy links be permanent, please? :) [edit]
- bendotc 18y agoI'm in total agreement. In the effort to become boring, Hacker News just became more interesting than it has been in the last couple weeks (silly links to Erlang Shen aside). I come here for this sort of stuff, or for thoughts on business, not to hear what computer nerds think about macroeconomics, politics, and flirting. If I wanted that stuff, I know Reddit's address.
- jpwagner 18y agoWhile I agree with the sentiment, I don't like the example used. I found the twittershouldhireme blog a good lesson: KNOW your audience. That girl was surely noticed by Twitter execs and she did something simple that no one else in her position thought to do. Erlang posts also belong here and politics usually does not, but don't pick on the twittershouldhireme girl. She's fantastic.
- bendotc 18y agoWhile I didn't find the twittershouldhireme lady very interesting, I don't know why you're complaining that you don't like my using it as an example, since I didn't. Was this reply was meant for another comment?
- ivankirigin 18y agoDo you think this is related to the multitude of company launches in YCW09 in preparation for demo day? That's a lot of TechCrunch posts.
- sutro 18y agoCan we submit posts about women who use the innards of Erlang to create sites to get hired by Twitter?
- melito 18y agoI come to the site daily, but haven't really noticed anything being really all that slow. Could just be timing. One thing I like doing is following the Hacker News twitter acct: http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/ http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/ It tweets popular stories and keeps me from visiting the site all that often (unless its a comment link). Its not a fix, but if anyone out there didn't know about it you should follow. It'll keep you from visiting the site every 5 minutes to see if anything new has been posted.
- mixmax 18y agoI was wondering what all those stories about Erlang were doing on the frontpage :-)
- icey 18y agoThe webserver is written in Arc, right? I wonder how hard it would be to inspect the referrer and if an abnormally large influx of users start coming from a specific referrer, start redirecting to programming.reddit.com or stackoverflow or something.
- w1ntermute 18y agoSorry guys, I'm here to stay. HN's so much more intelligent than Digg, Reddit, etc. Even the tech parts of those sites don't manage to filter out the junk as well. I hope it stays this way, though... Oh, and I actually found out about the site from Coding Horror (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001236.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001236.html), though I did read the Stack Overflow article as well (via Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8368a/the_value_of_downvoting_or_how_hacker_news_gets/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8368a/the_value...).
- amastilovic 18y agoThis question might sound ridiculous to majority of people commenting here, but why are you making the site boring instead of trying to improve its performance (putting additional hardware, ditching Arc, whatever)?
- rgoddard 18y agoFrom what I can tell, correct me if I am wrong, part of the purpose of this site is to operate as a testing grounds for Arc. The focus is on making the language better. So rather then improving performance by providing better hardware, it becomes a matter of improving the site through code. Either by changing the code running the site, or by improving the language itself. But given that this is more of a side project, the resources needed to improve the site are limited. Given the unusual spike in traffic, rather then using limited resources to fix it, or sacrifice the motivation to improve the code/language, the boring article approach is being used.
- johns 18y agoYes, that. And the site is not trying to be the most popular social news site on the planet. It aims to serve a specific niche that doesn't yet require more processing power.
- critic 18y agoI'm curious, where does a site like HN have its bottleneck: SQL accesses, server bandwidth, CPU or memory consumption by PLT?
- johns 18y agoThere is no database (see the other comments in this thread)
- deyan 18y agoI just love the energy of the community - Erlang everywhere!
- eugenejen 18y agoI almost thought the site was attacked by a group of guys that just trying to vote up all Erlang related sites. Now I know the reason.
- pibefision 18y agoPlease, don't start Ruby vs. Ergland or Erlang doesn't scale... :)
- raganwald 18y ago> You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring What, submitting a post where I laboriously implemented Surreal Numbers step by step wasn't boring enough?
- gommm 18y agoNo, it was a great read :-) I like what you're doing with http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic
- krishna2 18y agoMore people visiting a site does not make it bad..but more submissions and vote-ups could be the reason for the dilution. Just make that process as hard as possible. How hard can it be to make a user-unfriendly html-hiendish registration page, eh ? :)
- dschoon 18y agoMan do I love Erlang. I rushed over to HN as soon as I heard a new Erlang community had popped up!
- quizbiz 18y agoI had no idea what Erlang was until a few minutes ago. At this rate I might soon be an expert. naa, feed me more Erlang.
- jonursenbach 18y agoIf you're having such a hard time keeping up with the traffic, why not offload the burden of the site to some community members? Or what about throwing HN up on EC2?
- BonsaiKitt3n 18y agoI'm all set with Erlang now.
- rams 18y agoI have never laughed this hard when checking out the HN front page everyday morning.
- nikblack 18y agothats fine but at least let us do this: http://news.ycombinator.com/news/!erlang http://news.ycombinator.com/news/!erlang
- nikblack 18y agoactually if you click on that link now the result is kinda funny
- ryan-allen 18y agoThis is brilliant social engineering, and rather amusing!
- Spyckie 18y agoGreat. Now you've actually gotten me interested in knowing what Erlang is all about... and I've already got enough side projects to do in my spare time.
- misuba 18y agoI kind of love this, despite having little or no interest in Erlang. It's like that sequence from _The Wiz_ where Richard Pryor keeps declaring different colors to be in style and everyone shows up wearing them. pg should come along every so often - once a month maybe - and just announce that all submissions should be about an obscure language.
- charlesju 18y agoI can't believe pg implied that Erlang is boring, haha.
- eddycole 18y agoSo, HN is now like the rockstar who puts on a baseball cap and shades and thinks he's out at the WalMart incognito... Ahhh, I get it now. Shhhh ;-)
- maxniederhofer 18y agoErlang clogging the pipes...
- mroman 18y agoHooray! I vote for a permanent ban on fluffy links. The Fluffy category ought to include: - MBA related stuff - Suit related stuff - Content free linkbait articles that mention the words "hacker" or "hackers" in the title, like the absolute jewel we had yesterday, where one of the supposed must have skills for a hacker is a high wpm typing speed (I really do think that - in the near future - humans will be able to train monkeys to type) - Anything that would appeal to the majority of the "social networking" crowd - Anything that offers anything remotely related to the "program software (or any other worthwhile computer activity) with this product, no brain, education, or hard work required!" crack dream - Did I mention MBA/Suit related stuff? :) - Wannabe MBA fodder - Last but not least, I mean (sigh), how can I say this without coming off negatively? well, can't be said, but I will do it. I really do think that the best Heuristic is the Room Temperature Test: anything that would appeal to people whose IQ hovers even close to room temperature ought to be kept off the site period - this includes all of the above, particularly the MBA/Suit Neanderthal stuff.
- bianco 18y agoHN is slow lately because PG is a dreamer and too much tied to personal and insignificant taste details (which never combine with a greater user base): HN should have been written in CL. ;)
- csomar 18y agoI like the current version of HN and it's incredibly fast, so why change it? Congrats for the 33K unique a day!