Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

> I generally wait about 5 seconds between checks of a profile

If you're scraping HN, please wait 30 seconds (https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt) - our app server still runs on a single core, so we don't have a lot of performance to spare. (Hopefully that will change this year.)

If you need to check more frequently, https://github.com/HackerNews/API works fine and you can get JSON that way anyhow.

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Hey Dang, so actually I DO wait 30 seconds -- what actually happens is that I check on the frontend every 5, but the backend checks every 30 (that's the default) interval. If you can believe it the code looks something like this:

    export const DEFAULT_HN_POLL_DELAY_MS = "30000";
    export const DEFAULT_HN_POLL_MAX_CHECKS = 10;

The code isn't F/OSS but I hope you can take my word on this, worst case what happens is that someone launches two intervals (I don't have any locking on that side) due to hitting two different machines.

I'll be switching to the API by the end today and worst case by the weekend.

[EDIT] Forgot to add this -- hope I didn't cause any disruption on your end. thanks for all the hard work as always.

That sounds fine!

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