Why HN Got Slow

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2865985

by pg • 15 years ago

152 58 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We got MSMed. The post about baseball bat sales in the UK was the perfect media bait and they all linked to the item page.

I turned on comment thread pagination to decrease the load. I'll turn it off tonight.

jbseek• 15 years ago

Thanks PG, you must wear many hats.

LearnYouALisp• 15 years ago

What ever it is, it's always a white one. ("Yeaaaaah")

I was looking at [a list of hats](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat) recently, by the way.

melling• 15 years ago

Any time to address the endless number of reposts and the increase in volume of submissions?

benologist• 15 years ago

I'd like to see accounts that only submit the same site over and over again and don't otherwise participate penalized. That'd clear up the 'new' list a lot as well as dampen the duplicate submissions.

hoodoof• 15 years ago

Forgive my lack of worldliness but what is "MSMed"?

stevenp• 15 years ago

Main-stream media.

shadowmatter• 15 years ago

Mainstream media'd. Meaning someone from the mainstream media posted a link to that post, and the surge in traffic made everything slow.

samstave2• 15 years ago

Slashdotted Digged Reddited

Pick one

yuvipanda• 15 years ago

They aren't considered MSM.

NYT, Slate, Guardian, etc., rather.

watmough• 15 years ago

Your point is pretty reasonable, considering the meme sprang to popular awareness in it's 'Slashdotted' form, doubtless melting many servers down prior to appearing in the MSM.

mainguy• 15 years ago

I was searching on google trying to figure this out myself...

fname• 15 years ago

Link to the article?

nm, here it is: http://www.pcworld.com/article/237616/baseball_bat_sales_ris...

InfinityX02• 15 years ago

Crazy that a site such as PCWorld could bog down a site as popular (or so it seemed) as Hacker News. Goes to show what kind of a small fish Hacker News is in a much bigger pond..

JoeCortopassi• 15 years ago

I think you missed the point. What happened, was everyone (actual news organizations) linked to HN because the top link had a "scandalous" title. This wasn't because of a link from PCWorld

ehsanu1• 15 years ago

Well, I'd be surprised too if it was just due to PCWorld, but it's more than that. The guardian and the telegraph, and many other mainstream news outlets have gotten wind of this story: http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=b...

jerrya4• 15 years ago

We got MSMed. The post about baseball bat sales in the UK was the perfect media bait and they all linked to the item page.

Hmm. The past 48 hours a lot of sites have been slow for me: HN, Salon, FARK, ...

I figured I was getting Cox'd. http://cox.com

Vexenon• 15 years ago

I was wondering why the load times have been ridiculously long.

Also: I've been getting Cox'd as well the past three or so days. Maybe I should complain, or something.

jerrya4• 15 years ago

fyi, cox has their own local speed tests which can be informative as to where the hangup might be. The local one to me is:

http://azspeedtest.cox.com/

It's actually somewhat frustrating to see that register phenomenal speeds when the web past their internal routers seems ... buffering ... buffering.

kleeg• 15 years ago

I figured I was getting Cox'd

That's what she said...

I noticed the same with Fark as well. Also HuffPo.

loire280• 15 years ago

Cable providers provide terrible DNS service. You may notice a big difference in performance by changing your DNS settings to http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/ or http://www.opendns.com/. As a bonus, I've noticed that many service interruptions are DNS failures, not routing issues.

blinkingled2• 15 years ago

Absolutely - change the DNS _and_ put something like DD-WRT on your router with dnsmasq as the local caching proxy server. Nothing beats that per Steve Gibson's DNS benchmark!

jerrya4• 15 years ago

Thanks, but I actually do that using both Google's (8.8.8.8), as well as Level 3's (4.2.2.1)

dvdhsu• 15 years ago

You might want to try NameBench, which will find the fastest DNS server for you.

http://code.google.com/p/namebench/

ghshephard• 15 years ago

Be Careful about changing your DNS settings if you use a CDN - iTunes, in particular, offers horrible performance if you use googles DNS.

known• 15 years ago

Debug the connection with http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/

jerrya4• 15 years ago

Thank you.

pitdesi• 15 years ago

Interesting that that post itself (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2864557) is now on the 2nd page despite having 400some upvotes in the past 7 hours (odd because there are several posts with many less votes in a similar timeframe on the homepage).

Does that happen due to being flagged too many times or some other reason?

pbhjpbhj• 15 years ago

Speculation: there is an authority metric which is used as a strong quality indicator. If you're considered an authority then your vote counts a lot more.

7 votes from folks like patio11 counts for about a million votes by the likes of me.

Like I said, speculation.

zobzu• 15 years ago

I'm wondering also if some who down vote get a bigger down vote ratio. usually i lose points 1 by 1 and sometimes i just reload and lose 10 or more. Or that's cache. ;-)

And yeah I've strong opinions so while sometimes i get crazy upvotes I also get crazy downvotes hehe.

alex_c• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure it has to do with flagging. (that, as well, is speculation combined with personal observation).

niels_olson3• 15 years ago

Would norvig be on the list? aaronsw? I keep meaning to build a list of celebrity CS people on HN. Anybody already got one?

Sundog2• 15 years ago

So...we're Digg then?

rdl• 15 years ago

Will we have International Haskell Day later this week?

Locke1689• 15 years ago

Now there's a joke for the old-timers.

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

Those front pages filled with articles on relatively obscure programming languages are actually what got me to start reading HN.

dschoon• 15 years ago

You know, I still have a 50-odd Erlang article queue. So I'm not saying I want every day to be Haskell Day, but I'm also not saying I'd be terribly upset if I had a few hundred articles on Haskell to keep me warm at night...

niels_olson3• 15 years ago

What do you use for this queue? I can't possibly keep up with all the reading I come across, and often just relegate it to Readability, Instapaper, Delicious, Xmarks, etc. Would be very interested to hear how someone else handles this.

bluehat• 15 years ago

I have a historical Erlang article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2866337

Joakal• 15 years ago

PG, can you do the complimentary blog post "Well, these are my statistics to HN before and after getting MSM'd"

jvehent• 15 years ago

I'd be curious to see some numbers. Just for fun, and also to get an idea of the amount of visitors that kind of link can bring.

Capacity planning, they say :)

dennisgorelik• 15 years ago

Can caching help?

kunley• 15 years ago

Looks like HN has now some focus of link spammers.. see recent submissions.

Why HN Got Slow

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