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Comment by bentcorner | Hacker News Reader

General tip: If HN is being laggy and you're determined you want to waste some time here, open it in a private window. HN works extremely quickly if it doesn't know who you are.

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Wow this really works, thank you. What actually is the reason for it being much faster in a private window? Is there so much tracking going on in a normal window?

its faster because the pages are cached, they are effectively static. It's slower when logged in because the pages are created dynamically as it has your username, tracking favourites, upvotes etc, and much of it cannot be quickly cached.

Honestly surprised that HN, a website for techies, is so poorly coded. For example, the whole lack of proper "paging", with dang posting a disclaimer on every large thread for honestly over a year at this point and no progress. Or the fact that if you want to reply to a comment, it has to load a whole new page (which has to fetch more data from the server?) before getting to the comment box. Until recently, trying to collapse a large comment thread would also take 3s+ as I think it individually set the collapse state of every sub-comment?

The whole thing was put together in a somewhat obscure dialect of Lisp over 15 years ago. There’s probably under 100 people that write Arc regularly enough to meaningfully contribute, so the general approach has been to not fix what’s not broken.

This is not a very complex website, any HN reader could probably whip up a replacement from scratch over a weekend.

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.

Not to argue, just to post a contrasting view: while FB, and a lot of the internet, failed or slowed today—and I know there were tons of reports of HN slowing too—I also experienced a phone death and attempted to hobble along by putting my SIM back in my old iPhone 5. Basically the only thing that worked was HN. In fact it loaded as quickly as I’d expect.

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.

Most of the things I listed weren't really perf related, though they do show up when there's perf issues. Being able to "load more comments" and reply inline are super basic usability features. There's no reason why I'd need to navigate to a whole different page with a textbox, then navigate back and lose my position every time I post a comment.

One of the first optimizations large/high traffic sites will do, is cache pages for logged out users. even if the cache is only valid for a minute, that's still a huge reduction in server traffic.

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).

You can also just log out instead of opening a private window. Users that aren't logged in are served cached pages.

Could they offer cached pages to logged in users as an optimization? You only need to invalidate when a user posts a comment, most of the time you are reading now commenting?

This would make for a very good deep-dive technical discussion in an interview setting, I'm using this.

That explains why it works fine in my computer, where I haven’t logged in. Thanks for the tip.

This works like charm. Thank you!

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