If I dont use HN for a few mins it expires and clicking on next link shows an error message saying link expired. Why is this? Its a pain that I need to go and reload the main page and the click next to come back to the page i was on.
Why does HN timeout so fast?
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Why does HN timeout so fast?
#2Yeah. It's pretty whack
Re: Why does HN timeout so fast?
#3Glad you mentioned it, I was beginning to think it was just me.
Re: Why does HN timeout so fast?
#4I believe that there was a post about this before.
IIRC, the way that HN is set up, it re-distributes the "fnid=NSgN9i46gR" parameters at the end of the string to the first/second/third/etc. pages.
Reddit (a similar example) does this, but it also does it in such a way that the parameters "?count=50&after=t3_ihoin" fit into a SQL(/alternative DB) select statement.
This would probably be a better way for HN to do it, but they probably have a reason for why it's currently done this way .
Re: Why does HN timeout so fast?
#5Could you at least change the error page to include a link back to the main 'new' page?
Re: Why does HN timeout so fast?
#6It's a real pain when you link off to go read something in a new tab and come back to HN and try to paginate to the next page and you get the expired page. This happens to me all the time - so annoying.
LULZ, I just got it after commenting here and trying to go to the next HN page.
Re: Why does HN timeout so fast?
#7It does seem to vary a lot between about 2 minutes and 5 minutes of inactivity. Like I can read or even nicely skim 30 articles in 2 minutes...
Re: Why does HN timeout so fast?
#8It does seem to vary a lot between about 2 minutes and 5 minutes of inactivity. Like I can read or even nicely skim 30 articles in 2 minutes...
My guess is that it depends on the amount of traffic.
Edit: I remember a few years ago it would take 30 minutes to an hour before it expired. Maybe it deletes the oldest tokens first.
Re: Why does HN timeout so fast?
#9A while back, when the site was rather bogging down, pg made some changes to memory management (as I vaguely recall from one of his comments posted at the time). I believe part of this is more aggressive discarding of memory, and that part of the result was to succeed, or fail, more quickly without progressively tying up the server.
So, overall the server works better. When there's load, part of this include bailing sooner on your troublesome request. ;-)
In your case, this may include no longer having memory/context for stale pagination links. I deal with this by using a browser extension to load several pages of links at once. (Without a browser extension, one can achieve the same results by opening those links manually in new tabs and then working one's way through those tabs at one's leisure. I'd advise not overdoing this, though; no need to burden the server with requests you will seldom/never use.)
(I may be wrong as to the memory management. Again, this is just my vague understanding/recollection.)
Re: Why does HN timeout so fast?
#10It is brain-damaged that both Reddit and HackerNews do this.
Their next page URL's should either be page based ("show me page 4, even if page 4 has changed") or based on the next article ("show me the page that contains article 1234"). You might see a few duplicates are miss a few articles but you wouldn't get "unknown or expired link" errors.