10 to 20 seconds? That's pretty speedy. I've seen pages take minutes to load. I've noticed the slowness you speak of for a couple of weeks now.
That is slow for the HTML document to be returned (not rendered, but just returned).
Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#22[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#23Okay for me, though, I am in GMT+3.
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#24Yes, I noticed it too. I don't know what the backend is, but if it's on a single shared machine it might be too many inquires on the hardware at once. Maybe ask the hosting company to move it to a machine with a lower load.
As of 2 years ago, it was hosted on a "3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1" - it's certainly not a shared machine. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516122 ) rtm is the sysadmin for HN (yes, that rtm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris ).
IIRC, pg said that ycombinator.com (which is where all of HN's static content is served from) was on shared hosting.
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
As of 2 years ago, it was hosted on a "3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1" - it's certainly not a shared machine. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516122 ) rtm is the sysadmin for HN (yes, that rtm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris ).
IIRC, pg said that ycombinator.com (which is where all of HN's static content is served from) was on shared hosting.
It looks like ycombinator.com is hosted by SliceHost (http://www.whoishostingthis.com/ycombinator.com).
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#26It is slow for me as well. It seems that page needs some optimizations in order to be served and rendered faster when the server is under heavy loads. 1. I checked responses using FireBug plugin and it seems that pages are served uncompressed. For example the front page of the site (only html) is 31K uncompressed, with gzip compression it becomes 6.3K (80% smaller size means 80% less bandwidth to use). Most of web se…
Wouldn't server side caching run into issues since the page is different for each user? For instance, all the vote up/down buttons seem to have your username hardcoded into them as the href.
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#27Posting seems slower than it used to be. I'm sure PG is on the case. No complaints. I'm glad HN exists.
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#28news.ycombinator.com is loading in sub-seconds, but it uses stylesheets and images hosted on ycombinator.com (a separate server) - which is taking 20s+ to respond.
Makes me wonder if something is off with the caching directives on the static content.
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#29It is slow for me as well. It seems that page needs some optimizations in order to be served and rendered faster when the server is under heavy loads. 1. I checked responses using FireBug plugin and it seems that pages are served uncompressed. For example the front page of the site (only html) is 31K uncompressed, with gzip compression it becomes 6.3K (80% smaller size means 80% less bandwidth to use). Most of web se…
Wouldn't server side caching run into issues since the page is different for each user? For instance, all the vote up/down buttons seem to have your username hardcoded into them as the href.
Yes, it would.
I don't know how many people are not logged in, though. Those pages could be cached for a minute or so.
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#30It is slow for me as well. It seems that page needs some optimizations in order to be served and rendered faster when the server is under heavy loads. 1. I checked responses using FireBug plugin and it seems that pages are served uncompressed. For example the front page of the site (only html) is 31K uncompressed, with gzip compression it becomes 6.3K (80% smaller size means 80% less bandwidth to use). Most of web se…
Wouldn't server side caching run into issues since the page is different for each user? For instance, all the vote up/down buttons seem to have your username hardcoded into them as the href.
Yes you are right. I did not notice it. HTTP cache is effective on resources that are same for all users.
One possible solution is to decouple the personalized data and load it separately using AJAX. Votes are already implemented in a similar way.
Generally, I am proponent of HTTP caching. It requires some modifications of web sites in order to be effective but still the whole system remains less complicated, compared to implementations of cache on back-end (like `memcached').
For example reddit, which is similar to HN, is in constant struggle with their cache subsystems (http://blog.reddit.com/2010/05/reddits-may-2010-state-of-ser...). I believe it can be avoided by keeping cache and web site code apart.