Ask HN: Is HN slow for you lately? Or even not responding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is HN slow for you lately? Or even not responding?

62 pointskmt56 comments

For the past month or so, HN has been getting slower and slower. Do you experience that? A few minutes ago it was not even responding.

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Anyone else feel the site is getting too self referential? I noticed the lag as well, but is this worthy of a devoted thread taking up space on the first page?

The recent surge in self referential threads has felt Reddit-esque.

I completely agree. It's been getting that way for too long, and it's half the reason I check the site less frequently lately. I don't need to see a Happy New Year post here. It's cliche and unnecessary.

Polls about which text editor people use are the same, because they're just going to be repeated by newbies every few months.

My opinion is that self-posts should be on a separate page, by themselves.

I think the reason you get so many repeated posts from newbies, is that HN does not have a search feature. I think simplly adding a google search to HN would likely cut down on this issue.

http://searchyc.com/

SearchYC is often really slow, at least for me. The page loading times are on the order of tens of seconds. HN needs its own minimalist search engine designed to search for submissions.

I do find it very useful, though. I hope the guys behind it will get around to making it faster some time.

I'm working on a solution for this, but ultimately it comes down to hosting costs. SearchYC is currently hosted on a cheap-ish virtual server whose costs come out of my pocket each month. I can't justify spending more money on this project, given my personal financial constraints.

Traffic has been steadily increasing, and quite simply, the system can't handle the load at peak usage. I am, however, working to resolve some of these issues, but it may still be awhile before you see any improvements.

Indeed. Unfortunately, though I know about searchyc (because I've been around here forever), it's not very discoverable, so newbies haven't a chance. There is not, as far as I can tell, a single link to it in the HN menus.

Incidentally, Paul was working on search around this time last year. I wonder what happened to that.

Or google with site:news.ycombinator.com in the query.

Try clicking on the search icon at the bottom of the page next to the CO2Stats badge.

I did add something to the feature request page to this effect:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468256

Also, for what it's worth, I've been flagging most of these posts as they aren't intellectually stimulating and are almost as meta as this comment thread. :-) (Doesn't bother me in comments, but 4 out of 5 top stories being about Hacker News is dumb.)

Agreed. Please make a separate page for the 'Ask HN' posts and keep the main page just for relevant news stories. Right now too many 'Ask HN' posts keep popping up.

This IS a message board.

A month ago it was a news site. I'd prefer things to go back.

Incidentally, I did submit that as a feature request:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468256

How else are you going to report it publicly so that everyone can share their experience?

Also, perhaps there's something to learn from the issue, in other words it's relevant (it's both hacker and news)

Otherwise, yes, I agree: this is meta news.

There's been a sort of strange convergence of a lot of "Ask HN" threads today. I don't really like it, but I honestly think it could be a coincidence, or more likely, the self-referential nature of the orange-related threads have made everyone think about the quality of the karma system and the community as a whole.

In general I agree - but for this specific issue I think it is valid. The performance of late has been terribly, about 40% of the time in my 20 minute window I have to access it are failed responses - so I am not checking back less and less.

I am not sure what else we are supposed to to - email pg and complain about its slowness ?? ;)

Fortunately there's a setting for this:

(= nourl-factor* .1)

Better now?

Perhaps one tweak -- links back to news.ycombinator.com are weighted the same?

Please tell me that you seriously didn't just make it so that news articles without a link have 10% of the weight of news articles w/links.

Yep! They had 60% before. The optimal answer is probably somewhere between the two.

The computation for the orange usernames was destroying performance. Not directly, but because it caused a lot of stuff to get loaded from disk that would not otherwise have been. So I've temporarily turned the feature off till I can write a more efficient version.

Do you mind posting the current code for it? I'm sure some of us would love to give optimization a shot.

Optimizing a program via messageboard would be like writing a program by mail.

Or like a programming competition.

That's how most open source development happened for a long time.

I appreciate the offer, but it's not the kind of optimization that consists of taking one chunk of code and making it faster. The answer will consist of several little changes spread out throughout the code.

It seems like it is something that could be computed once every few hours and cached without affecting the experience.

How come you just didn't do the computations as a background process and let it run when each new comment comes in?

Apropos of this, has anyone had success by swapping a platter-based disk drive for a SSD?

caused a lot of stuff to get loaded from disk that would not otherwise have been

Why not just keep it all in memory? We talk a lot, but it doesn't seem like the database should be all that large...

PG: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468585

Maybe that'll help.

Edit: Paul's post here made that link irrelevant.

It crashes every couple of hours and then takes a few seconds to minutes to come back up.

I've just been playing around with the source code to see if I could figure out why it would lose the port, but the only thing I can think of is if the whole mzscheme process dies, otherwise it would just hang while trying to connect and it doesn't do that.

It's running out of memory. The half million or so of HN comments and stories no longer all fit in memory at once. This is not in itself a problem. We only load stuff as needed, and only crawlers ever look at the older stuff. But it does mean that eventually (currently after a day or so) we run out of space and the server crashes and restarts. I'm working on a less crude version of garbage collection.

I guess you don't need to worry about all that complicated fragmentation with the current GC. :)

It's a great scalability test then! Memory is cheap, so that should not be a really big issue then, 32G of ram in a server is nothing special these days. Unless of course you're already maxed out, then it is a different issue.

How big is the working set of HN ?

We're maxed out on the current server.

Yes. In fact, I noticed problems increasing around the time of PG's 2009-01-15 "Faster" news.

Exactly. It was not faster for me but slower. I didn't report it though, because my own connection was unstable at the time (I was playing with asterisk and my LAN).

I tried to respond to you, but it 404'd you which was ironic. Yes, it does seem a bit janky today.

Yes, that has been occurring frequently for me.

Many times when it hangs for me, I seem to get the "static" parts of the page (title, upper bar) and as soon as the dynamic parts would be expected to load it hangs or times out or goes very slowly.

Yes. This morning around 9 or 10 (eastern) it was slow -- took many tens of second for indivual links or the main page to come up.

But it seems to be recent -- I can't recall it happening before this week.

Yes, sometimes it doesn't load, shows a blank page. I wonder if it's seeing malware from my machine, but clearly not given other eyewitness accounts.

Yes it was "dead" for me for a few minutes just now

I've had trouble when I clicked on 'submissions' for a while, and now even 'threads' is getting pretty slow.

The "threads" page is very slow for me but the front page is actually faster than it was a few weeks ago.

It's the orange names :)

Yes, I've noticed a lot of slowdown as well, primarily when viewing comments.

It's seems plenty fast to me. I'm on slow connection and I get snappy page loads.

the site feels like it's slowing down a lot, and this is even after the highlight name feature was removed. you guys read what happened when google made the tweaks to display more results right?

Yes, not responding at random times.

Nope, it's working fine towards me.

I haven't had any trouble with it.

Dear everyone:

Stop meta-referencing - go make something.

yup, did not load for 20 minutes just now

Yes, mainly when viewing my profile page.

ARC doesn't scale!

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