Is Hacker News Slow for You?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283245

by doki_pen • 16 years ago

72 43 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

When it finally loads, the style and images are missing. Is it just me?

twism• 16 years ago

not slow... but images are not showing up for me.

patrickk• 16 years ago

Yep, that's a problem for me too. Images and hyperlinks aren't rendering properly. Checked HN in Chrome, Firefox and Safari to make sure, and cleared cache.

j_baker• 16 years ago

It seems to be an on-and-off thing. The comments and submissions links on profiles are the worst offenders.

allyt• 16 years ago

http://ycombinator.com is down, and it looks like Paul is hosting the static content of the site there...

pg6• 16 years ago

Yes, that's the problem. We just switched over to serving the static stuff off this server while we investigate. The extra load may make things here a bit slower but the site seems usable.

mrshoe• 16 years ago

Is the change to 25 front page stories a temporary one, to help performance?

evanrmurphy• 16 years ago

Does HN run on srv.arc and app.arc?

snissn• 16 years ago

did i win? http://twitter.com/mseiler1/status/12598697037 or was i too slow :)

d_c• 16 years ago

Yes, no images.

zck3• 16 years ago

For a few days, I've had the problem where the threads page (e.g., http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zck) takes a long time to load (> 30 seconds), and sometimes doesn't load at all, ending up with just a blank page -- no html is loaded.

wvenable• 16 years ago

This has been happening to me for weeks.

pg6• 16 years ago

This is a different problem from the one we're experiencing now. Threads takes a long time the first time because items are lazily loaded.

zck3• 16 years ago

Interesting; I have noticed that once the threads page loads, it generally works fine the second time. I've been trying not to hammer on it too much to see when it works/doesn't work, though.

I guess it's one way to tell if the server's been restarted since I last was here. :)

lsb• 16 years ago

Why lazily load items yourself instead of use a database, like Postgres or even SQLite, that handles the paging in and out itself?

dkarl• 16 years ago

This has been happening to me since I signed up.

zandorg• 16 years ago

Slow on Threads page, images didn't load recently. Images fine now (but not Threads)

However... The 'GREEN Certified Site' image now loads after about 6 months as a dead image!

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

Same here—sometimes when the rest of HN seems to be working normally, I end up with timeouts on Threads.

rdl• 16 years ago

I have been having a lot of stupid caching behavior, too (I think I have a transparent cache between me and yc, and there doesn't seem to be an Expires header. Some article pages show me as logged out, or when I try to reply, I get deleted/expired link message.

jheriko• 16 years ago

seemed to be temporary...

anderzole• 16 years ago

yes!

kapitti• 16 years ago

I've had a 15-30 second delay after clicking onto the comments thread for a few days now.

caccount• 16 years ago

Its good to me now.

pg6• 16 years ago

We finally have an explanation for what happened. Our site was turned off by our hosts, who couldn't believe the traffic was legit. Maybe time to look for a different hosting company...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283430

TallGuyShort• 16 years ago

Wow - and they didn't even contact you about it? I thought this had been a pretty high traffic, well known site for a while.

zck3• 16 years ago

Was there a large jump in traffic, or are they just not willing or able to host a site of this size?

tlb2• 16 years ago

No, it was fairly gradual.

lotharbot• 16 years ago

Considering what a big deal "reliability" is to most hosting companies (and customers), this is a shockingly stupid response.

tlb2• 16 years ago

Pair.com decided to shut down our hosting, because we got 150k hits in 30 minutes. Not that much, really. Anyway, I switched to Slicehost.

imajes• 16 years ago

are you seriously hosting news.yc on slicehost?

gregcmartin• 16 years ago

gmartin$ whois -h whois.arin.net 174.132.225.106

OrgName: ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc. OrgID: TPCM Address: 315 Capitol Address: Suite 205 City: Houston StateProv: TX PostalCode: 77002 Country: US

pg6• 16 years ago

Not news, www. They're separate servers.

pyre• 16 years ago

It's worth noting that Chromium was still giving me bad images/css even after the outage until I moved to a completely new tab. (Even with trying ctrl+F5, though I'm unsure that Chromium binds that to 'reload + reload cache' like IE did/does.)

jonknee3• 16 years ago

HN is the single slowest website I use regularly and not just because the www server was cut off today. Typical page loads are 10+ seconds and if I want to view my threads page it usually times out before finishing on the first request (sometimes it's the same for the home page). It's quite absurd considering the audience.

Oh and it took three tries to post this comment, I kept getting timeouts.

tokenadult• 16 years ago

The same here. That was AFTER the fix that pg announced of changing his static content over to a new hosting service.

MikeCapone2• 16 years ago

Same here. Very slow for me, and when I try to load my comments or submissions pages, I often get a timeout and have to try 2-3 times.

I've always found it a bit ironic that a website where there's probably one of the highest concentration of good coders/web people was so slow and unreliable. But maybe that's just the nature of the beast; reddit is slow too, and they have a lot more resources.

jonknee3• 16 years ago

From what I've read it's because pg uses this as a playground for arc and is far from optimized. It would be great if he got some help from the community though, it is embarrassingly slow.

gnaritas2• 16 years ago

Perhaps it's you, or latency to you, the sites always quite snappy and fast for me and I never see load times like that. Most pages load in 700-800 milliseconds for me and pretty much always have.

ShardPhoenix• 16 years ago

A possibly related issue is that I occasionally find myself logged in as someone else when I load the front page (ie some other user's name/karma are displayed in the top right). This goes away after refreshing or loading any other link (so I can't post as someone else, for example).

Plus I get that "unknown or expired link" error sometimes when trying to post (including when trying to post this message). This seems to occur when clicking on a thread from the front page loads an out-of-date version of the thread, and can be fixed by force-refreshing the thread page.

Is Hacker News Slow for You?

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