Improving HN's performance. Voting is horribly expensive. That wasn't a problem originally but it's starting to become one now that there are so many users.
I feel like upvoting your comment because that sounds interesting and concerning everyone here, but I don't want to be part of the problem!
You're not. You're helping him test his improvements
how many users are we up to?
11492 accounts, many of them inactive of course. There are more users than that, because many users lurk for a while before creating accounts. We now get around 45k unique visitors on weekdays.
awesome, out of curiosity, what kind of server is HN running on?
edit: guy below me who maxed out the thread, server not language
as of ~a year ago: "3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1"
It's still that one. We were starting to spend too much time gcing once everything got lazily loaded, but a few days ago I started throwing stuff out of memory and now it looks like we've got performance back into the tolerable range.
Wow, no kidding. And I'm certain items are missing from the beginning of the list. I know they're still saved somewhere, because I can't upmod those articles.