Is it just me or HN also feels kinda laggy?
I guess there does exist many alternative UIs, though I don't see many that support commenting. I wonder if the "API" (if there's any) allows for that, or if people are just scraping the page and reformating it.
There’s plenty of stuff I’d like to be different about usability of this site, but perf is basically at the bottom of that list.
The cache is faster because its not having to talk to the database, and can be done at by the load balancing layers rather then the actual application layer.
Wikipedia does this too (although, via a layer to add back on the ip talkpage header).
From wiki: the thundering herd problem occurs when a large number of processes or threads waiting for an event are awoken when that event occurs, but only one process is able to handle the event. When the processes wake up, they will each try to handle the event, but only one will win.
The DNS entries should be cached by the browser (and the middleware), so that this problem should only happen once, but I get this constantly.
Also, I sometimes get an error message from HN, which seems to indicate that this is some backend issue which fails gracefully with a custom "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" on top of a 502 code.
It feels more like there is something else still broken.
EDIT: actually HN failed to post this comment the first time I posted it!
If you get one of those on your comment submission you have no way to know if the trouble stopped it from accepting the comment or if it accepted the comment and ran into trouble then trying to display the updated thread.
For some reason I can't even begin to guess at HN does not seem to have protection against multiple submissions of the same form, so if after getting "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" on your comment submission you hit refresh again to display the page and the form gets resubmitted, you get a duplicate comment.