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Comment by leoff | Hacker News Reader

It's very weird how most websites already figured out how to keep their services up under load, but a CRUD text-only forum, with an "elite community of techies", can't.

I would be curious to know what is the big challenge here.

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Probably the fact that the software was written decades ago, hacked together and also the author decided to first write their own lisp, then implement HN software with this lisp (called Arc).

I'm guessing that has something to do with the difficulty of changing it.

I almost wonder whether they even care about changing it, because why? This site has been completely functional aside from some load-bearing issues here and there. It's not like it's an ad plagued, high stakes, profitable venture.

I agree, I would say it's perfectly capable just the target for success is different. It's not a commercial venture aiming for 99% availability and a dropped request here and there isn't that impactful.

I would wager that it has more to do with the fact that it's served by a single one-core server: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39548439

If anything, that showcases that the software stack is quite capable, however old and hacky it may be.

And I suppose that HN is not too high up on the list of priorities for YC :) It works most of the time, and dang can put out any fires...

If it can't run on multiple cores, and a single core isn't enough to run it well, then I would say that the software stack is not quite capable.

Racket, the language Arc is built on top of, can handle concurrency and parallelism, so it is possible. If someone has time/energy, that I don't know.

However, Arc was initially written in sometime early in 2000s. I don't think dual-core processors became more common at home until later...

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