TC Slows Hacker News - Start the Arc can't scale rants.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133489

by Readmore • 18 years ago

12 32 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It was inevitable now it's time to start the blog posts about how Arc can't scale to the web. ;)

mixmax• 18 years ago

For a language that was released a month ago I would be surprised if it did scale.

pg5• 18 years ago

At these moderate loads the problem is more likely to be in the design of the web server than the language itself.

wehriam2• 18 years ago

I think your web server might be broken.

pg5• 18 years ago

Rather a self-refuting comment...

Readmore• 18 years ago

I would agree. I just wanted to tongue in cheekly get this post over with.

pg5• 18 years ago

In fact it was a design flaw, though not in the server.

The code for checking whether a username was taken was inefficient, so it was taking a huge amount of time to create a new account. The culprit was this line:

  (some [is dcuser (downcase _)] (keys hpasswords*))

The reason the TechCrunch post slowed the site down so much was not the traffic per se but the number of those visitors who were creating new accounts. I pasted a fix into the repl, so the site should be faster now.

Thanks to Rtm for narrowing the problem down to account creation.

Flemlord• 18 years ago

   The reason [the site was slow] was not the traffic... 
   but the number of visitors who were creating new accounts.

The only better startup problem than that is "the site was slow because so many people were trying to give us money that our credit card processor crashed".

Excedrin• 18 years ago

I wish my webserver had a repl.

TheTarquin2• 18 years ago

My friend Mike once told me: "When you can't tell the difference between public opinion and a DDoS, you're either doing something right, or doing something horribly wrong."

Hexstream• 18 years ago

Hope you'll actually commit the change to the codebase so that the problem doesn't resurface on server restart like it happened once...

iamelgringo• 18 years ago

Are you coding live on the server? Or do you have a test platform that you work on first, and then past working code to the repl on the webserver?

almost• 18 years ago

Any chance you could fix a bug in the header handling as well? It's not accepting "Content-length" headers (lower case l) which is perfectly acceptable HTTP and happens to be what w3m produces. Means I can't post comments from w3m.

joecomotion• 18 years ago

What type of tests do you guys maintain for news.yc other than the live deployment? Did this hiccup result in something like an account creation stress test being added to an automated test suite?

immad• 18 years ago

The slowness is a self-defense mechanism. Slow down new signups and submissions.

Its genius really

wehriam2• 18 years ago

Arc can heal.

ibsulon• 18 years ago

Time to write it in an enterprise language -- I suggest C++.

(Seriously, though, this should give pg and company some valuable benchmarking data for later on.)

ltbarcly• 18 years ago

What about arc makes anyone think it can scale? Is there an example of a continuations based web server that can?

mrevelle• 18 years ago

Seaside (http://seaside.st), which powers dabbledb (http://dabbledb.com/).

lyime• 18 years ago

I was hoping a big blog would NOT post about news.YC I would rather have this community be small and focused rather then become something like Digg.

iamdave• 18 years ago

This was bound to happen, I'm afraid. If TechCrunch didn't do it, some Digg kidd would have.

thomas• 18 years ago

maybe it was just the server?

zetaprime• 18 years ago

Hacker news was a welcome relief from Reddit and Digg, Reddit is so political now that there are few articles anymore about "the craft". Aside from the the prerequisite preachings from the "GREAT!" Paul Graham (amen brothers), there was some very germaine content at times. I will be curious to see how they weather the coming storm, of course they do have have an ARC. Lol, I know ver ver bad pun.

apathy• 18 years ago

programming.reddit is not bad.

But, yeah, if you're a hacker, hacker news is better yet.

TheTarquin2• 18 years ago

The TC front-paging: A clever Arc stress-test organized by Paul Graham? Investigative report at 11...

TC Slows Hacker News - Start the Arc can't scale rants.

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