Ask HN: Are HN servers overloaded? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are HN servers overloaded?

30 pointsjxub27 comments

Every nth time I recharge I see a NGINX error template. It looks as there are some problems with high volume. Anyone else experiencing it? I'm in Spain/EU FYI.

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A while ago there was a big thread -- and they put up a note asking folks to log out if they were just reading.

It seems like logged in users cause extra load while HN calculates scores and points. IF you're not logged in, HN can serve up cached results much faster.

That 1k+ thread re: MS/GitHub must be taxing the system.

(Not a HN insider, just mentioning what I rememberd from last time)

I just tried logging out and I think you're right - HN was much faster. I'll keep this in mind in future - I usually stay logged in, but if it's making this much difference in load on the hN servers, I'll log out if I'm not commenting.

Yes, steam is coming out of our single-core process in disconcerting places.

We've got some duct-tape measures we can take, but there's also some huge work we've been doing to overhaul performance that should come online pretty soon. Unfortunately it may be a bumpy ride until then. And if that doesn't work...well it better work.

HN has felt glacial to me over the past few hours. I wondered if I'd been put on slow-down, but it was slow even when logged out.

Now I've had this a couple of times:

    An error occurred.

    Sorry, the page you are looking for
    is currently unavailable.  Please
    try again later.

    If you are the system administrator
    of this resource then you should
    check the error log for details.

    Faithfully yours, nginx.

So there are problems.

I like how, according to their HNStatus twitter thing (1), there have been no problems since April 2016!

1) https://mobile.twitter.com/HNStatus

Absence of Twitter isn't Twitter of absence.

It is when there's still a page which says "we might be having issues, see our twitter feed for more info" and links directly to that :)

Yep, also experiencing it here in NYC. I'm assuming it's because of the high traffic volume from the Microsoft/Github-related posts.

I haven't seen any errors, but pages are taking way longer than normal to load for me. I'm in St. Louis, Missouri.

EDIT: just got the nginx error page others have mentioned.

The reddit redesign that's been rolling out has likely brought increased users to here overall, and the github accustion plus the above means a higher than normal amount of people are discussing the github accustion here rather than on /r/github or /r/technology

Same here in Toronto. Periodically dropping to the HN error page displaying old status tweets :>)

Even worse I sometimes get a page that shows my the HN status twitter, last updated in 2016.

Problems, site very slow, Berlin, Germany. Posting takes >30 sec.

Seeing the same issue in London, so you're not alone.

Anyone know what language HN is written, what stack etc?

Common Lisp, I think...

No, Arc running on top of Scheme.

Arc, a dialect of Lisp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)#His...

There's not really a "stack", it doesn't even use a database (everything is stored in files).

> it doesn't even use a database (everything is stored in files).

No wonder HN is crashing...

Nothing noticeable here in VA over the past few hours.

I received a couple bad gateway errors recently.

No problems here in VA over the past few hours

Yes, page load can take as much as 10-15 s.

Slow in Silocon Valley. I’m on Comcast.

Intermittently not loading. Denmark.

Slowdowns here in Boston.

No problems here, Italy.

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