15 ms·

Hacker News would scale better with some caching headers

14 points by sayrer 18y ago

sayrer$ curl -I http://news.ycombinator.com/news HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Connection: close

Confusion 18y ago
A question that must be asked before investing any time in adding to an existing application: would it solve an existing problem? The Right Thing isn't always necessary and often not worth the time.
ROFISH 18y ago
It is being done for the images. I assume no caching for the front page since it's assumed the front page changes enough to not warrant it. ryan$ curl -I http://ycombinator.com/images/y18.gif http://ycombinator.com/images/y18.gif HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:04:58 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.10 Last-Modified: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:03:07 GMT ETag: "7fa02b-64-42bf6725588c0" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 100 Content-Type: image/gif
- jwilliams 18y ago
  More likely: -- the content for the front page is served by Arc, whereas the static media is served from a separate Apache instance. Arc's current HTTP server libary (src.arc) only supports HTTP/1.0.
  - sayrer 18y ago
    Well, HTTP doesn't really have versions other than as a shorthand for header defaults. For example, Connection: close handles implementations that assume HTTP 1.1, iirc. An Expires header would help a lot for arc-generated pages served in response to requests that aren't associated with a logged in user.
- fhars 18y ago
  According to the Yslow developers, even thse replies could be made far mor cache friendly by using the correct headers, especially by removing the ETags-header that forces a conditional GET on every acccess and replacing it with an Expires-header in the far future that allows to reuse the cached version without server interaction (assuming the images are not meant to be highly dynamic, then ETags would make sense). So from a caching perspective, HN has got it exactly backwards: it doesn't use ETags on the dynamic pages, where it might help, but uses it on the static content, where it might be detrimental. But I wouldn't bet on the gains you'll get from fixing this to be measurable.
- whughes 18y ago
  There're three images on the whole site. Is it really making a difference?

14 points by sayrer 18y ago

sayrer$ curl -I http://news.ycombinator.com/news HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Connection: close

Confusion 18y ago

A question that must be asked before investing any time in adding to an existing application: would it solve an existing problem? The Right Thing isn't always necessary and often not worth the time.

ROFISH 18y ago

It is being done for the images. I assume no caching for the front page since it's assumed the front page changes enough to not warrant it. ryan$ curl -I http://ycombinator.com/images/y18.gif http://ycombinator.com/images/y18.gif HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:04:58 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.10 Last-Modified: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:03:07 GMT ETag: "7fa02b-64-42bf6725588c0" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 100 Content-Type: image/gif

jwilliams 18y ago
More likely: -- the content for the front page is served by Arc, whereas the static media is served from a separate Apache instance. Arc's current HTTP server libary (src.arc) only supports HTTP/1.0.
- sayrer 18y ago
  Well, HTTP doesn't really have versions other than as a shorthand for header defaults. For example, Connection: close handles implementations that assume HTTP 1.1, iirc. An Expires header would help a lot for arc-generated pages served in response to requests that aren't associated with a logged in user.
fhars 18y ago
According to the Yslow developers, even thse replies could be made far mor cache friendly by using the correct headers, especially by removing the ETags-header that forces a conditional GET on every acccess and replacing it with an Expires-header in the far future that allows to reuse the cached version without server interaction (assuming the images are not meant to be highly dynamic, then ETags would make sense). So from a caching perspective, HN has got it exactly backwards: it doesn't use ETags on the dynamic pages, where it might help, but uses it on the static content, where it might be detrimental. But I wouldn't bet on the gains you'll get from fixing this to be measurable.
whughes 18y ago
There're three images on the whole site. Is it really making a difference?