It's not just you.
Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
41–46 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#42Nope I am having the same issues, glad to know it's not just me!.. although it seems to vary on the time of day.
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#4310 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.
Depends on your location and your pipe, I suppose. I expect simple pages like this to be returned and rendered within a second.
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#44I can't find the HN story, but I seem to remember that PG was rebooting the server quite regularly. It must be pretty difficult when you're looking at having to toss up continuing to use the language with it's limitations or start looking at changes to Arc. Maybe a front-end cache like nginx would help?
As stated elsewhere it really seems to be a problem with the static content hosted on ycombinator.com (maybe they aren't being cached very well browser side). I don't know how well something like a front end cache would do to speed up content delivery as I suspect news.yc has a lot more users logged in than normal websites which might take away the advantages of a front end cache.
Webkit's resource tracker shows that most of the static content is taking anywhere from 10-14 seconds to be requested, and then loading with a 304 not modified.
The page, from the news.ycombinator subdomain is loading quick, as is the tracking code. (180ms latency)
Firefox works the best for me, as it seems to just time out and not request anything.
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#45Earlier 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 seems to be on SliceHost (if nothing changed in the mean time) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283430.
Re: Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?
#46news.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.
It's been slow for me as well past 1-2 weeks and yes, it's problem with static files - they take 20-30s to load.
Caching seems to be fine - I'm getting 304s for stylesheets and images (and they are served from local cache according to firebug and chrome dev. tools) which means it actually takes 20-30s of wait time for the server to just return the headers.
I wonder if it might be problem with Keep-Alive which is on (with 15 sec. timeout I think) - there's probably bunch of apache processes / threads sitting idle waiting for connections to close and with the amount of traffic hn gets I would imagine there's quite a few of them.