Ask HN: Why Is HN Having Trouble Servicing Us More Often Recently?

5 points·simonblack··9 comments

I seem to receive this page: "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" quite often lately.

Because Sam Altman was fired and it blew up the server.

OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman (openai.com) 3939 points by davidbarker 1629 comments.

The admins had to paginate the comments.

Other than that, who knows? When sites are slow, I hop over to HN because it's the fastest to respond, being text-based, and it tells me that the internet is awake.

Hacker News does not rely on any public cloud infrastructure; and uses a completely bespoke web framework and (I believe) bespoke programming language. Scaling that setup is hard.

The website response time seems to have peaked during the OpenAI drama last night: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/

When this happens, log out of HN or load HN in Incognito Mode (not logged in), and you'll get fast page loads by hitting the front end cache.

And this helps reduce the load for everyone else, too

Arc Doesn't Scale™

cos it's still running off an old server. that and bigger news stories lately, so the YC data center currently likely resembles the fields around Ypres, ca. 1918

> [...] the YC data center [...]

sctb (previous HN co-moderator) mentioned a few years ago that hosting is provided by "M5 Hosting."[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041

it is said, it is a "poor single-core server"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com