
Why HN is slow lately - pg
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.<p>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.
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pg
Ok, 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.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
holy shit, i stepped away for like 30 minutes and the entire front page is
Erlang. I just submitted the _Innards of Erlang_ article as a response to PG's
post/an inside lol for the community (the article is a decent primer though).
Almost the entire front page is a bit much guys...

~~~
albertcardona
As of 22:12 European time, it's the first page _and_ the second page. Olé!

~~~
gdee
:) What's European time? I imagine we (you and me) share Central European Time
(CET) but ET?

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mhyrr
Until I read this, I wondered about the sudden popularity of Erlang

~~~
cake
Erlang, the next Ruby On Rails ?

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buro9
Damn, 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.

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davi
_You 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
Or 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
This sounds like a really really good idea.

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w1ntermute
Sorry 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>), though I did read
the Stack Overflow article as well (via Reddit:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8368a/the_value...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8368a/the_value_of_downvoting_or_how_hacker_news_gets/)).

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axod
Ever 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.

~~~
3pt14159
Or include some fairly simple auto-generated questions.

"At what point does y = 2e^(2x) cross the line x = 2, accurate to 2 decimal
points? y = __.__ x = __.__" Extremely simple for a hacker, daunting for the
general public. (answer: tinyurl.com/b95cdw rounded up with x = 2.00, of
course)

~~~
aarongough
You might also get the occasional serious hacker who is just retarded at math
(like me!)

~~~
timknauf
I would go further, and venture that 'serious hackers who will make good HN
citizens' and 'people for whom the above problem is trivial' are two different
sets (though the intersection of those sets might be significant).

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haasted
Seems like submitting boring Erlang stories immediately turned into a meme.

First one on HN?

~~~
unalone
First 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.

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Steve0
I'm off to upmod some boring stories.

~~~
spooneybarger
upmod the what web frameworks are missing. snoooze.

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moe
Still 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
If I remember correctly, Arc is an ongoing experiment in language design, not
high-performance implementation.

~~~
jcl
And it's running on top of PLT Scheme, which adds another layer of
interpretation.

~~~
gnaritas
And 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
In 2 GB of memory.

~~~
lsb
Extrapolating from the memory-growth graph, how much time would a 16GB ram
machine buy you?

~~~
jwilliams
I'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
Ok maybe not: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512801>

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amichail
It 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>

~~~
aaronblohowiak
I'd wager it is due to Stack Overflow's recent article.

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jasonlbaptiste
Done.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512178>

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ivankirigin
Do 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.

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dschoon
Man do I love Erlang. I rushed over to HN as soon as I heard a new Erlang
community had popped up!

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raganwald
> 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
No, it was a great read :-) I like what you're doing with
<http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic>

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sutro
Can we submit posts about women who use the innards of Erlang to create sites
to get hired by Twitter?

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amastilovic
This 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
From 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
Yes, 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.

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melito
I 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/>

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.

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arien
I 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
if they were going to stick around anyway, then its worth it for the comedy
factor alone.

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misuba
I 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.

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critic
I'm curious, where does a site like HN have its bottleneck: SQL accesses,
server bandwidth, CPU or memory consumption by PLT?

~~~
johns
There is no database (see the other comments in this thread)

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krishna2
More 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 ? :)

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icey
The 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.

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pibefision
Please, don't start Ruby vs. Ergland or Erlang doesn't scale... :)

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Spyckie
Great. 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.

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charlesju
I can't believe pg implied that Erlang is boring, haha.

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eddycole
So, 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 ;-)

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jonursenbach
If 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?

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eugenejen
I 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.

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quizbiz
I 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.

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csomar
I like the current version of HN and it's incredibly fast, so why change it?

Congrats for the 33K unique a day!

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ojbyrne
I feel the urge to twitter/blog that second paragraph, because it's funny.
Must...refrain...

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rams
I have never laughed this hard when checking out the HN front page everyday
morning.

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mixmax
I was wondering what all those stories about Erlang were doing on the
frontpage :-)

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jauco
Are the new viewers gone yet?

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deyan
I just love the energy of the community - Erlang everywhere!

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ryan-allen
This is brilliant social engineering, and rather amusing!

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nikblack
thats fine but at least let us do this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/news/!erlang>

~~~
nikblack
actually if you click on that link now the result is kinda funny

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maxniederhofer
Erlang clogging the pipes...

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thepanister
Did 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.

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mroman
Hooray!

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.

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bianco
HN 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_.

;)

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BonsaiKitt3n
I'm all set with Erlang now.

