Ask HN: Is HN having issues? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is HN having issues?

53 pointsrzk23 comments

Pages are loading slowly and sometimes returning "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!"

Someone asked the other day "How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34001410) so obviously someone is now trying to figure out how to work around it, and it seems they succeeded!

Or, it's just busy :) I think the software in general have problems with long/deeply nested comment chains so maybe having a few of those being popular is enough to bring things to a halt.

By the way, you can usually work around performance issues on HN by either logging out (removing cookies if it doesn't load) or using incognito mode/private window (being logged out) as then the software can just serve cache views instead of having to fetch data on each navigation.

Edit: from the almighty dang:

> I've moved that one off the front page, partly because these are more or less the same story, but mostly because the traffic on this is boiling our poor server and I need to resort to tricks. Sorry all!

From "Twitter Suspends PG's Account" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044525

Seems Elon Musk/Twitter is the one to blame for HN being slow right now.

>I think the software in general have problems with long/deeply nested comment chains

nah, look at twitter for example! i don't think that's the reason of HN being slow/not responding..

Twitter generally limits threads to < 20 replies, you need to click a button to see more. Large HN threads have 200+ replies.

I don't mean in the sense of "this is a hard problem in computer science" but more "the specific software that runs HN (Arc) haven't been optimized for this". That there is pagination on the comment thread is something that was added as a stopgap to prevent the issue from being even worse. At one point, HN was almost unusable as lots of comment threads hit the limit, so they added the pagination thing while trying to figure out how to solve it properly. I'm sure if you search for "by:dang pagination" or something similar you can find more information about it.

Yeah... aside from Hacker News running on a single threaded server, the language it runs in isn't very efficient, and the application uses text files and RAM rather than a relational database, so scalability and data synchronization are always an issue.

It's great for what it is but pg's application design philosophy seems to have stopped at "macros go brrrr" so it has definite limits as well.

Yeah, maybe an unintentional DDOS from Twittee/Elon

That and this is a huge deal, in today's times.

PG created this community, and elon musk is in charge of the other one. Who isn't coming to hacker news to see the comments?

Let the fun begin.

Yes, sorry. Unusual traffic, especially for a Sunday.

Yeah, dang has just posted the following at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044475

"[...] but mostly because the traffic on this is boiling our poor server and I need to resort to tricks. Sorry all!"

I am confused/curious why that one in particular is causing server strain: HN has had much more contentious and faster growing (points/comment-wise) posts.

IIRC, replies are worse than top-level comments and everyone was replying to Paul.

Slow for me. I’m guessing traffic spike from the Twitter drama.

A tip (which I learned from @dang years ago). Browse in "private mode", which is much easier on the server than browsing while you're logged in.

The server IIRC does a decent amount of work per page determining your user-id and various behaviors of the text. But if you're a default, anonymous, "private" browser, the webpage is always more responsive.

Not necessarily "as responsive as it should be" mind you, but it does seem to help.

For me it takes almost 10 seconds to load from Sweden/Stockholm. So it may indeed be some sort of service issue.

I’ve been having that issue for years. Occasionally it will do that and after a while go back to normal. I’m actually sunrises to see so many people mention it lately.

Yes it is barely accessibly from a location in Europe. Httping gives me 1-2 seconds. Other sites hosted in the US are fine (for me).

Same here, at times. Login page took good 3 sec to show, login submit about the same. This page itself though, arrived promptly. Parts of hn are struggling with something.

I was getting comment-banned after 5 in one hour (5-10 in 24 hours) Which lasted for 2 hours, and then happened again another day.

I think that's regular limit for everyone and has nothing to do with server overload, I'd appreciate if HN was clear about these comments time limits (and whether they are also related to your karma/score), by my years long experience it's something like 5 during maybe 3 hours after which you can post more, but I've never read about this clearly mentioned anywhere.

Thanks for the info, I'll keep that in mind. Maybe I just never commented enough to trigger it until recently. But if you say 5p/3h, then that is at least a one hour shorter timer that I'm seeing which is a plus

Can confirm, had to reload new page twice to look for this exact thread.

Browse the site logged out

Yes

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