Ask HN: What's the datastore behind HN?

18 pointsklochner6 comments

I've noticed that the front page loads significantly faster than the threaded comments page.

I'd be interested in a discussion as to what causes the relative slowness of the discussions.

Is it just homepage caching?

S-expressions stored in files, lazily loaded, and occasionally gced.

There are many levels of caching, but it could simply be that the homepage has 30 things on it while a threads page might have hundreds.

PG, may I distribute my scrape of HN?

I don't personally have any objection to it but it sounds like some users do.

Why not move to Java EE 6 platform?

The original raison d'etre of HN was to exercise the one it's built on.

I was actually just trolling after a few beers. I know the story behind HN.