HackerNews is super slow from AWS

10 pointsorenbarzilai5 comments

In the last couple of days HackerNews became super slow to access from AWS (~5 min average to load a page). Any idea what's going on? is it intentional?

*checked @Virgina region

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I don't know anything about that, but I'm guessing you're trying to scrape HN. I use the "unofficial API" instead: http://api.ihackernews.com/

It works, but has its own problems, specifically intermittent 500 failures. So I wrap all my requests in something that can retry them: https://github.com/leknarf/hn-notify/blob/master/hn.py

Not scrapping. For different reasons I am using a private proxy on AWS and I have to turn it off to access HN. Anyone knows if it's a temp issue?

seems like it's working properly now.

Sigh...My "Hacker News Reader" Android app, with 7,000 active installs, depended on a piece of Sinatra/Heroku code to do the screen-scraping. My app is dead for now. I'm going to port the code to Java and get rid of the idea of having an intermediary. I thought it was safer if the screen scraping was centralized so that I could fix it once and for all when things changed, but it worked out that it was a single point of failure.

Yeah, I'm also porting all of my scraping code to the device itself. It's a bitch, but HN is so ban happy and unreliable that it's becoming a requirement.

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