

Ask HN: Is HN slow for you lately?  Or even not responding? - kmt

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.
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jwesley
Anyone 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
I 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.

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profgubler
I 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.

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zain
<http://searchyc.com/>

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rw
SearchYC 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
I do find it very useful, though. I hope the guys behind it will get around to
making it faster some time.

~~~
chengmi
I'm working on a solution for this, but ultimately it comes down to hosting
costs. SearchYC is currently hosted on a cheap-ish virtual server whose costs
come out of my pocket each month. I can't justify spending more money on this
project, given my personal financial constraints.

Traffic has been steadily increasing, and quite simply, the system can't
handle the load at peak usage. I am, however, working to resolve some of these
issues, but it may still be awhile before you see any improvements.

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pg
The 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
Do you mind posting the current code for it? I'm sure some of us would love to
give optimization a shot.

~~~
palish
Optimizing a program via messageboard would be like writing a program by mail.

~~~
Shamiq
Or like a programming competition.

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Shamiq
PG: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468585>

Maybe that'll help.

 _Edit: Paul's post here made that link irrelevant._

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jacquesm
It 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
It'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.

~~~
jacquesm
It'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
We're maxed out on the current server.

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gojomo
Yes. In fact, I noticed problems increasing around the time of PG's 2009-01-15
"Faster" news.

~~~
kmt
Exactly. 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).

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TrevorJ
I tried to respond to you, but it 404'd you which was ironic. Yes, it does
seem a bit janky today.

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brk
Yes, 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.

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ilamont
Yes. 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.

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zandorg
Yes, 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.

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ErrantX
Yes it was "dead" for me for a few minutes just now

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davidw
I've had trouble when I clicked on 'submissions' for a while, and now even
'threads' is getting pretty slow.

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fauigerzigerk
The "threads" page is very slow for me but the front page is actually faster
than it was a few weeks ago.

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walesmd
It's the orange names :)

Yes, I've noticed a lot of slowdown as well, primarily when viewing comments.

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donniefitz2
It's seems plenty fast to me. I'm on slow connection and I get snappy page
loads.

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jmtame
the 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?

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raamdev
Yes, not responding at random times.

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jansson
Nope, it's working fine towards me.

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Rabidmonkey1
I haven't had any trouble with it.

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rw
Dear everyone:

Stop meta-referencing - go make something.

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corgan1003
yup, did not load for 20 minutes just now

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geuis
Yes, mainly when viewing my profile page.

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Andys
ARC doesn't scale!

