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Comment by MikeCapone | Hacker News Reader

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MikeCapone

Disclaimer: I am not a programmer or web guy.

Would this technology be beneficial to Hacker News? Is the site currently hosted on a SPDY-compatible server?

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Its only for Rack based apps (Ruby) and this website is written in pg's own lisp-like language. So, no :)

Maybe I'm confused; I thought SPDY was a HTTP replacement written by Google:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY

Yes, SPDY is a cross-platform protocol. This submission is a Ruby implementation of a SPDY server for Rack applications like Ruby on Rails. The news.ycombinator.com server is written in the arc language. SPDY is awesome.

Ok. It's my fault for not being clear in my original message. I wasn't talking about the linked SPDY implementation but about SPDY in general. Sorry, I should have marked it as OT.

All good - we are all here to share knowledge :-)

No, HN is currently using the regular HTTP protocol. In my opinion, the costs of implementing SPDY support, at the moment, outweigh the benefits of that support.

SPDY benefits pages that make many requests (lots of CSS, JS, images, etc.); HN doesn't have any of that so no.

I don't know why, but I find HN pretty slow for a page that only shows 30 links. Engadget takes about half the time to load. Granted this is with Adblock and WidgetBlock, which I use to block all 3rd party connections besides Disqus, but HN doesn't use any of that anyway, so it's still strange.

HN does no output buffering, causing rendering time to often be closer to 5 seconds than 100ms in Europe. This is trivial to fix, but I guess the SFO crowd don't feel the pain so it probably never will.

Edit: nope, that's not it. Using the fastest UK machine with clean net available to me, tcpdump never shows more than 1 unacked packet on the wire at any time, gzip is turned off, and keepalive is turned off. Gzipping the 24k home page drops it to 4.3k.

None of this really accounts for the crazy jitter we see in Europe while rendering the main table.

Sat in the UK I don't see anything like a 5 second render time for HN, maybe 1 second at most.

For me:

The top half of the page draws instantly in Chrome, then the bottom half.

In firefox, the page draws incrementally, line by line.

In IE9, the whole page draws pretty much instantly, much quicker than FF or Chrome for me.

Wouldn't fix all the "unknown or expired links"!

Well, re: speed and lack of bugs, HN is really not the best showcase for functional languages in web programming...

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