

Why HN Got Slow - pg

We got MSMed.  The post about baseball bat sales in the UK was the perfect media bait and they all linked to the item page.<p>I turned on comment thread pagination to decrease the load.  I'll turn it off tonight.
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hoodoof
Forgive my lack of worldliness but what is "MSMed"?

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samstave
Slashdotted Digged Reddited

Pick one

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yuvipanda
They aren't considered MSM.

NYT, Slate, Guardian, etc., rather.

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samstave
It was a historical reference

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icefox
2nded, I haven't heard 'Slashdotted' to mean getting traffic from slashdot.org
in a while, but it does seem to have stuck as the means of saying we got a ton
of traffic from some other website linking to us.

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jerrya
_We got MSMed. The post about baseball bat sales in the UK was the perfect
media bait and they all linked to the item page._

Hmm. The past 48 hours a lot of sites have been slow for me: HN, Salon, FARK,
...

I figured I was getting Cox'd. <http://cox.com>

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loire280
Cable providers provide terrible DNS service. You may notice a big difference
in performance by changing your DNS settings to
<http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/> or <http://www.opendns.com/>. As a
bonus, I've noticed that many service interruptions are DNS failures, not
routing issues.

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ghshephard
Be Careful about changing your DNS settings if you use a CDN - iTunes, in
particular, offers horrible performance if you use googles DNS.

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ComputerGuru
Why do you think iTunes would care what DNS server you are using? I'm
genuinely curious, as I would think that the DNS lookups are abstracted by the
OS, and even if they were not, I cannot see how using a different (esp. a
better performing) DNS server would hinder iTunes performance — especially
since the original DNS isn't provided by Apple or anything.

~~~
ryannielsen
CDNs often rely on your DNS info to determine which node is closest to you
and, thus, which node should offer the best performance.

Using a central DNS like Google's can do two things:

1) Break locality. Using 8.8.8.8 may cause CDNs to potentially direct you to a
node that's nowhere near your actual physical location

2) Aggregate traffic on a node. The more people using 8.8.8.8 for DNS, the
more people who may land on the CDN nodes associated with 8.8.8.8's location
and thus that node may be more loaded than the one closer to you

[edit] Google even covers this in their Public DNS FAQ:
<http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#cdn>. They offer 31
different locations, while Akamai may offer thousands of nodes (I can't find
hard numbers, but they refer to 1,200+ points of presence here
<http://www.akamai.com/hdonline> and 1,000 networks here
<http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/edgeplatform.html>). You're basically
constraining yourself to a small subset of at least Akamai's CDN by using
Google Public DNS.

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michaelcampbell
> CDNs often rely on your DNS info to determine which node is closest to you
> and, thus, which node should offer the best performance.

Why do they do this? Wasn't DNS SUPPOSED to be something that wasn't in any
way tied to locality? Are CDN's just using the side effect/fact of life that
they happened to fall out that way, because it's easier?

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ComputerGuru
Pretty much, yes. But it's not just easier, it's also simpler. If you do the
distribution at the DNS level (which is pretty much as low as you can go), you
don't have to deal with the much messier geo-distribution on a higher level.

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rdl
Will we have International Haskell Day later this week?

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dschoon
You know, I still have a 50-odd Erlang article queue. So I'm not saying I want
every day to be Haskell Day, but I'm also not saying I'd be terribly upset if
I had a few hundred articles on Haskell to keep me warm at night...

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niels_olson
What do you use for this queue? I can't possibly keep up with all the reading
I come across, and often just relegate it to Readability, Instapaper,
Delicious, Xmarks, etc. Would be very interested to hear how someone else
handles this.

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Joakal
PG, can you do the complimentary blog post "Well, these are my statistics to
HN before and after getting MSM'd"

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fname
Link to the article?

nm, here it is:
[http://www.pcworld.com/article/237616/baseball_bat_sales_ris...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/237616/baseball_bat_sales_rise_on_amazon_uk.html)

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InfinityX0
Crazy that a site such as PCWorld could bog down a site as popular (or so it
seemed) as Hacker News. Goes to show what kind of a small fish Hacker News is
in a much bigger pond..

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ehsanu1
Well, I'd be surprised too if it was just due to PCWorld, but it's more than
that. The guardian and the telegraph, and many other mainstream news outlets
have gotten wind of this story:
[http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=b...](http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=baseball+bat+amazon&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest#q=baseball+bat+amazon&hl=en&client=opera&hs=h4x&rls=en&channel=suggest&prmd=ivnsu&source=lnms&tbm=nws&ei=gtdBToDGBYHu0gGsmvy-
CQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=4&ved=0CBUQ_AUoAw&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=2e0b124d14493641&biw=1364&bih=635)

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InfinityX0
Ah, I was using Yahoo! Site Explorer as a judge.. which only showed PCWorld.
[http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGk.jo20F...](http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGk.jo20FOKxgAdjLal8kF?p=news.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D2864557&fr=sfp&bwm=i)

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jvehent
I'd be curious to see some numbers. Just for fun, and also to get an idea of
the amount of visitors that kind of link can bring.

Capacity planning, they say :)

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jbseek
Thanks PG, you must wear many hats.

~~~
LearnYouALisp
What ever it is, it's always a white one. (" _Yeaaaaah_ ")

I was looking at [a list of hats](<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat>)
recently, by the way.

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kunley
Looks like HN has now some focus of link spammers.. see recent submissions.

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dennisgorelik
Can caching help?

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pitdesi
Interesting that that post itself
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2864557>) is now on the 2nd page despite
having 400some upvotes in the past 7 hours (odd because there are several
posts with many less votes in a similar timeframe on the homepage).

Does that happen due to being flagged too many times or some other reason?

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pbhjpbhj
Speculation: there is an authority metric which is used as a strong quality
indicator. If you're considered an authority then your vote counts a lot more.

7 votes from folks like patio11 counts for about a million votes by the likes
of me.

Like I said, speculation.

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niels_olson
Would norvig be on the list? aaronsw? I keep meaning to build a list of
celebrity CS people on HN. Anybody already got one?

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nitrogen
This would be a good start: <http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>

What amazes me is that as much as I read HN, there are still people in the top
10 whose comments and submissions I've never seen. I wonder if they got all
their karma years ago and it's taking this long for everyone else to catch up.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
To be fair, some of them mostly submit stories (compare e.g. tptacek and
fogus; the first has lots of comments but few stories, the other is the other
way round.)

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melling
Any time to address the endless number of reposts and the increase in volume
of submissions?

~~~
benologist
I'd like to see accounts that only submit the same site over and over again
and don't otherwise participate penalized. That'd clear up the 'new' list a
lot as well as dampen the duplicate submissions.

