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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Yes, 'Who Is Hiring' days strain our server in general and there are a lot of other things going today, like Slack being down and the holidays being over. (Edit: and one mammoth 500-comment subthread that I've since split in two.)

Sorry. I hate slow software.

Edit: for the time being, I've lowered the number of comments that get rendered per page. That's helping some. It means you'll all have to click more More links at the bottom of threads to see all the comments. One day this will all be better.

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This is the first time I've ever had a slow experience with HN, so there is no need to be sorry. A damn fast website can have a few slow downs once in a while in my mind. HN is the opposite of slow software, and even at its slower moments, it still beats the majority of the modern web (looking at you, Reddit redesign).

It's all relative. I find it too damn slow.

Time to RIIR? (... Sorry, I couldn’t resist)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23483715

I don't want to come across as contentious but will. you. please. just. use. a. real. database.

A flat-file architecture only scales so far. This is probably the only forum on the internet where a thread passing 500 comments is an actual problem - and remember, you're planning on getting rid of pagination, which means no theoretical limiter on request sizes. In a few years when 500+ comments threads become the norm among another million users, disk I/O is going to be more and more of an issue.

Racket has a perfectly good database library, just kick the problem upstairs and be done with it.

You're very obnoxious

Please don't post like that to HN, no matter how obnoxious someone is or you feel they are. It only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe. Many people here are. It's still a valid criticism.

No need for the apology I think. You guys do a great job keeping this place simple and fast for us.

I hope you don’t mind me asking but what’s the purpose of having a comment in the top to direct to different pages. There is already a more button on the bottom which makes the top comment kind of redundant.

Also a tip for others when HN is slow or almost down (like when Google was down): you can open a private tab and navigate HN from there. Since you’re not logged in, you’re served a copy from cloud flare. It’s usually out of date by 1min or so but good enough for reading in my opinion.

I'm super curious about HN metrics like number of visitors, RPS at peak hours, details about the db, is it still flat files?

Does that affect HN replies? Or does it have other issues?

I have not received any notification mails in the last days

It's still pretty fast for me. I wouldn't have noticed if not for this post.

You guys rock!

> Yes, 'Who Is Hiring' days strain our server in general and there are a lot of other things going today, like Slack being down and the holidays being over. (Edit: and one mammoth 500-comment subthread that I've since split in two.)

You have access to both highly qualified people (that read HN and would most likely be glad to help you engineer a system (paid or unpaid) that would not be strained by usage) AND access to money if that was needed to improve things (and pay for a solution).

Does HN still run on a server colocated in a data center?

Is there a budget that you need to adhere to? YC certainly makes money and can afford to pay for a better setup.

A bit embarrassing HN should not run as if if it was operated out of one person's basement, budget, or expertise. (And it's not 1996 either it's 2021 and HN does not even have anything but text).

> A bit embarrassing HN should not run as if if it was operated out of one person's basement, budget, or expertise.

To me, this is a hopeful message. It is still possible to run a website out of one's basement and have it become a staple of internet culture.

On the contrary... Running a site like this with the hot new rube goldberg stack and drastically overpriced VMs would be embarrassing.

I find the simplicity here quite comforting.

> Does HN still run on a server colocated in a data center? Is there a budget that you need to adhere to? YC certainly makes money and can afford to pay for a better setup.

Why is a colocated server considered a bad setup? I think that actually getting the resources you pay for (instead of being on an overprovisioned VM host) and not being scammed on network data transfer fees is a great setup.

It's single-threaded, isn't it? If so I'm sure the hardware is fine and not the bottleneck.

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