Among the mega high-traffic websites reddit seems to be the slowest and most unreliable. Many times it simply won't load, or log you out for no reason. Why do you think reddit never manages to improve its infrastructure?
Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
#2The cynic in me has to guess that too much of their development efforts are geared around disrupting and managing viewpoints that their users and corporate sponsors find problematic.
To give a small example: back when a certain subreddit used to frequently appear in /r/all Reddit apparently wrote code to prevent it from ever appearing there again.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
#3[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
#4Well their JavaScript "new" site sucks so horribly that it even brings my heavy gaming PC to its knees.
Clearly they have no clue what they're doing (probably at management level, even bad devs can do better than this) or they have a ton of legacy code they're trying to write around.
But even the old one had its issues. Deep threads with thousands of posts would often crash when you clicked the "read more" to go deeper and instead redirected to the top. So it could be that's where it's at. I assume a complete code review / partial rewrite would be very hard to justify at Reddit's scale.
I'd use the old one but I find it so clunky. Even though it has the same density of hacker news it lacks all its grace.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
#5Well their JavaScript "new" site sucks so horribly that it even brings my heavy gaming PC to its knees. Clearly they have no clue what they're doing (probably at management level, even bad devs can do better than this) or they have a ton of legacy code they're trying to write around. But even the old one had its issues. Deep threads with thousands of posts would often crash when you clicked the "read more" to go deep…
There are many frontend issues for sure. But I just don't understand why so many HTTP requests to the site fail. E.g. pages are simply blank about 20% of the time.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
#6Well their JavaScript "new" site sucks so horribly that it even brings my heavy gaming PC to its knees. Clearly they have no clue what they're doing (probably at management level, even bad devs can do better than this) or they have a ton of legacy code they're trying to write around. But even the old one had its issues. Deep threads with thousands of posts would often crash when you clicked the "read more" to go deep…
There are many frontend issues for sure. But I just don't understand why so many HTTP requests to the site fail. E.g. pages are simply blank about 20% of the time.
Aha that's not really what I'm seeing on my side. I very often get the error page with the "funny" picture but not 20% for sure. Maybe it's user dependent or only affects some subs?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many frontend issues for sure. But I just don't understand why so many HTTP requests to the site fail. E.g. pages are simply blank about 20% of the time.
Aha that's not really what I'm seeing on my side. I very often get the error page with the "funny" picture but not 20% for sure. Maybe it's user dependent or only affects some subs?
A hard refresh for me is a roll of dice, I usually expect it to fail.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
#8An alternative frontend that was mentioned on HN earlier today: https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
#9I assume they want to nudge everyone onto their app so they can bypass ad blocking and anti tracking efforts.
Just like Instagram, tiktok, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so slow and unreliable?
#10i used their iOS app, and they seem to have an outage around once every two weeks. other than that the performance is fine. it must be a front end problem