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Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

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Re: Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the offensive domain name (it's not mine), but this is relevant here: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

I prefer http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ which was my inspiration for my blog design http://benlowery.co.uk/ :)

The red font on dark grey background you used is off-putting.

Re: Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

#72

Without looking I can tell you it's two reasons: 1) It's text based and, therefore, can keep its total response small. 2) The page is cached on the backend so database lookups are kept infrequent and small. Those two reasons alone make it faster than, say, 80% of most web sites.

Non-text sites of old weren't as slow as the current ones. Progressive rendering and not bringing in a MB of JavaScript and fonts and other shit is what makes it fast. HN could easily add images and still stay fast.

That this is even a question is just sad. It means the slow web is just accepted. Most web pages aren't particularly more functional than they were 15 years ago. Sure, maybe search boxes have auto-complete. But taking a screenshot to compare output? You could achieve much the same stuff, pixel-per-pixel, back with table-based layout. Yet even though we're running machines over 10x more powerful, things are laggy.

It's embarrassing, annoying, and dumb.

Re: Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the offensive domain name (it's not mine), but this is relevant here: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

I prefer http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ which was my inspiration for my blog design http://benlowery.co.uk/ :)

You know, after 20 years of www, one'd think browsers would be able to competently format text files already. The fact that we need that small amount of css (instead of it just being available) means the web is still broken.

Re: Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome, thanks for the additional info. On a related note, I really appreciate how good CloudFlare is about knowledge sharing. Not a lot of companies would be so willing to share information that's so integral to their business.

On the other hand, they do some stupid stuff, disregarding the standard and how useful it is [0]. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/deprecating-dns-any-meta-query-t...

Disregarding standards is not uncommon when you're actually running a high-performance system that faces attacks. Plenty of stuff goes into specs that just doesn't make sense while operating. Their explanation of why they are disabling ANY seems perfectly fine.

Re: Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

#76
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So every time a new comment is posted, is the CloudFlare cache invalidated and replaced with a new version of the comments page?

Actually for now, HN is not caching their HTML with us. we put a "CF-Cache-Status" header for when we are caching things

Are they using Railgun to only transmit changes? Railgun seems like the neatest thing CF offers, as, AFAIK, you get the bandwidth benefits of caching without having to deal with invalidation.

Re: Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

#77
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one is crazy. How are they so fast?

No, forum.dlang.org is not crazy-fast. Other sites are crazy-slow. Write compact and easy-to-render HTML, it's no rocket science. Write some trivial CSS, you don't need Bootstrap. Make something dead-simple and call it flat design . If you have more than one stylesheet, concatenate them into one. Consider minifying. You don't need a 200 kB JS framework in order to fade in some hover menu. If you do need more than one…

>No, forum.dlang.org is not crazy-fast. Other sites are crazy-slow.

You're ignoring that this site does use jQuery and webfonts and loads all of those pretty avatars separately. 22 requests, at my count.

For the reasons you list - i.e. words to the effect of "don't use all of this stuff" - I think that it is impressively fast, and their achievement shouldn't be hand-waved away quite so readily.

Re: Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

#78
post #59
post #18

If you want to see an even faster "forum", see http://forum.dlang.org/

I have been puzzled by this being said about dlang forever and today about HN. These sites are certainly not noticeably slow, but I don't notice anything remarkably fast about them either. Am I not visiting enough of the slow sites ? My working hypothesis is that I don't have a good understanding of web-development to appreciate the nuances. Much akin to me listening to Indian classical music, Jazz: I would often enc…

With an empty cache, for me, hacker news loads in ~700ms.

Under the same conditions, the dlang site loads in ~200ms.

That's half a second faster, which is definitely noticeable when clicking around.

Re: Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ which was my inspiration for my blog design http://benlowery.co.uk/ :)

You know, after 20 years of www, one'd think browsers would be able to competently format text files already. The fact that we need that small amount of css (instead of it just being available) means the web is still broken.

Check out Firefox reader view.

Re: Ask HN: Why and how is Hacker News so fast?

#80
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been puzzled by this being said about dlang forever and today about HN. These sites are certainly not noticeably slow, but I don't notice anything remarkably fast about them either. Am I not visiting enough of the slow sites ? My working hypothesis is that I don't have a good understanding of web-development to appreciate the nuances. Much akin to me listening to Indian classical music, Jazz: I would often enc…

> Am I not visiting enough of the slow sites? Do you use NoScript? I feel the same way because I usually run with JS turned off. Most things are pretty zippy despite using a computer from 2009.

Ah! that and flashblock might explain it.
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