Ask HN: Why is Hacker News loading so slowly?

2 points·prakhar897··9 comments

Taking close to 40 sec per click from a few days, any idea why?

Does it perform poorly on all of the browsers, computers, connections, and VPNs you have access to? If so, you may have figured out how to slow down time!

I’m also noticing the same. My rudimentary testing in dev console times shows that it “waits” for the most part, then immediately loads the page.

I had doubts about my ISPs DNS, changed it to use cloudflare dns, it didn’t help much.

tcpdump or a pcap should probably show something fairly obvious for a 40 second delay. But my guess is path mtu problems. I've written a test for this; it's unpolished but might help you out.

http://pmtud.enslaves.us/

click start, and wait for the test to finish. If the table shows notes other than OK in the right column, you might have an issue. If you do, probably you can fix it by applying MSS clamping on your internet router, or manually setting an MTU appropriate to your connection.

tried, everything comes OK.

This happens infrequently, where sometimes pages take very very long to load. Other sites run fine meanwhile.

If I were you, I'd run something like tcpdump -n -w ycomb.pcap host news.ycombinator.com

and leave it running; if you experience an issue, note the time, ctrl-C tcpdump and open it in wireshark and see if you see anything interesting.

If there's nothing there, it might be a DNS issue, which you'd need a different pcap for. You might also need to select the right interface.

Like the other commenters so far, I'm not having any issues either.

Hacker News is not available in some parts of the world. Like me, I have to use a VPN all the time to access it. The quality of the VPN is crucial in this case.

It loads in less than 1 sec for me

I notice no difference at all.

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