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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

HN is my favorite site, what a wonderful community. PG: thank you for putting it together.

However, the site is not fast, seriously, a site that's so simple containing just a few text should be blazingly fast. It does not take too much science to reach this goal.

I understand that it can be interesting running it via an Arc program, but you hit millions of page views, and there are people that are using this site every day to get together, to share their knowledge, and so forth, and it's a shame that there is to wait too much at every page view.

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Do you mean it's slow now, or that it was slow a week ago? It doesn't seem slow to me now.

It is no longer too slow, but still not as fast as it could be. I must admit, my experience is filtered by the fact that I'm in Italy and I guess there are many hops between me and the HN servers, but still loading pages seems to take something in the order of one second.

Being the layout very simple to render, no graphics, there are all the prerequisites to make the HN experience "google alike" from the point of view of latency.

What is your ping latency? I get about 200ms from Greece, site doesn't load blazing fast but it's usable, nowhere near 1 second.

From Italy ping latency is 200ms, but page loading is veeery slow (1.3 seconds for home page, 3 seconds for comment pages if they are not too big).

So I tried form UK (linode server):

https://gist.github.com/820303

Ping latency from linode is 100 ms.

So my bad experience is clearly the combination of two things: HN is slow generating pages, taking something like one third of second to generate the home page. Add this to the latency and you are half a second for the home, and more for than 600 ms for comment pages.

This in the UK. In Italy there is apparently also some bandwidth issue, and since the markup is pretty verbose compared to the content, this could be dramatically improved too.

For instance Google.co.uk is served in 73 ms from the same place.

My blog takes 300 ms from my crappy ASDL (the same where hacker news takes 1.4 seconds).

There are huge margins for improvements.

Site seems to have slowed for me too now. Especially the front page. Gzip would probably help with the bandwidth issue but I don't think that's at fault.

I wonder if pg would accept a yc news written in python/redis :)

I can't propose a so biased implementation ;) A faster HN is already a big enough gift.

The problem is more Racket than Arc. By the way I feel Reddit more slower and with worse uptime than HN.

Reddit serves an order (or two?) of magnitude more traffic, and the fact another site is slow does not make HN faster ;)

Btw I've no precise idea about the software stack HN use, I'm just proposing a quality change, that is faster, the mean it is achieved is another (very interesting) topic.

A million page views in a week while Reddit does a billion in a month. So about ~250 orders of magnitude.

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is 24 orders of magnitude more than 1. Reddit isn't near that traffic yet.

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