Ask HN: Is HN slow for you lately? Or even not responding?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468586

by kmt • 17 years ago

62 56 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

For the past month or so, HN has been getting slower and slower. Do you experience that? A few minutes ago it was not even responding.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

Yes it was "dead" for me for a few minutes just now

gojomo• 17 years ago

Yes. In fact, I noticed problems increasing around the time of PG's 2009-01-15 "Faster" news.

kmt2• 17 years ago

Exactly. It was not faster for me but slower. I didn't report it though, because my own connection was unstable at the time (I was playing with asterisk and my LAN).

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

I tried to respond to you, but it 404'd you which was ironic. Yes, it does seem a bit janky today.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

It crashes every couple of hours and then takes a few seconds to minutes to come back up.

I've just been playing around with the source code to see if I could figure out why it would lose the port, but the only thing I can think of is if the whole mzscheme process dies, otherwise it would just hang while trying to connect and it doesn't do that.

pg7• 17 years ago

It's running out of memory. The half million or so of HN comments and stories no longer all fit in memory at once. This is not in itself a problem. We only load stuff as needed, and only crawlers ever look at the older stuff. But it does mean that eventually (currently after a day or so) we run out of space and the server crashes and restarts. I'm working on a less crude version of garbage collection.

jhawk28• 17 years ago

I guess you don't need to worry about all that complicated fragmentation with the current GC. :)

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

It's a great scalability test then! Memory is cheap, so that should not be a really big issue then, 32G of ram in a server is nothing special these days. Unless of course you're already maxed out, then it is a different issue.

How big is the working set of HN ?

brk• 17 years ago

Yes, that has been occurring frequently for me.

Many times when it hangs for me, I seem to get the "static" parts of the page (title, upper bar) and as soon as the dynamic parts would be expected to load it hangs or times out or goes very slowly.

pg7• 17 years ago

The computation for the orange usernames was destroying performance. Not directly, but because it caused a lot of stuff to get loaded from disk that would not otherwise have been. So I've temporarily turned the feature off till I can write a more efficient version.

Shamiq3• 17 years ago

Do you mind posting the current code for it? I'm sure some of us would love to give optimization a shot.

palish• 17 years ago

Optimizing a program via messageboard would be like writing a program by mail.

pg7• 17 years ago

I appreciate the offer, but it's not the kind of optimization that consists of taking one chunk of code and making it faster. The answer will consist of several little changes spread out throughout the code.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

It seems like it is something that could be computed once every few hours and cached without affecting the experience.

jonursenbach2• 17 years ago

How come you just didn't do the computations as a background process and let it run when each new comment comes in?

lsb• 17 years ago

Apropos of this, has anyone had success by swapping a platter-based disk drive for a SSD?

andreyf• 17 years ago

caused a lot of stuff to get loaded from disk that would not otherwise have been

Why not just keep it all in memory? We talk a lot, but it doesn't seem like the database should be all that large...

Shamiq3• 17 years ago

PG: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468585

Maybe that'll help.

Edit: Paul's post here made that link irrelevant.

raamdev• 17 years ago

Yes, not responding at random times.

jwesley• 17 years ago

Anyone else feel the site is getting too self referential? I noticed the lag as well, but is this worthy of a devoted thread taking up space on the first page?

The recent surge in self referential threads has felt Reddit-esque.

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

I completely agree. It's been getting that way for too long, and it's half the reason I check the site less frequently lately. I don't need to see a Happy New Year post here. It's cliche and unnecessary.

Polls about which text editor people use are the same, because they're just going to be repeated by newbies every few months.

My opinion is that self-posts should be on a separate page, by themselves.

profgubler• 17 years ago

I think the reason you get so many repeated posts from newbies, is that HN does not have a search feature. I think simplly adding a google search to HN would likely cut down on this issue.

wheels3• 17 years ago

I did add something to the feature request page to this effect:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468256

Also, for what it's worth, I've been flagging most of these posts as they aren't intellectually stimulating and are almost as meta as this comment thread. :-) (Doesn't bother me in comments, but 4 out of 5 top stories being about Hacker News is dumb.)

defied• 17 years ago

Agreed. Please make a separate page for the 'Ask HN' posts and keep the main page just for relevant news stories. Right now too many 'Ask HN' posts keep popping up.

jonursenbach2• 17 years ago

This IS a message board.

wheels3• 17 years ago

A month ago it was a news site. I'd prefer things to go back.

Incidentally, I did submit that as a feature request:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468256

kmt2• 17 years ago

How else are you going to report it publicly so that everyone can share their experience?

Also, perhaps there's something to learn from the issue, in other words it's relevant (it's both hacker and news)

Otherwise, yes, I agree: this is meta news.

nihilocrat• 17 years ago

There's been a sort of strange convergence of a lot of "Ask HN" threads today. I don't really like it, but I honestly think it could be a coincidence, or more likely, the self-referential nature of the orange-related threads have made everyone think about the quality of the karma system and the community as a whole.

michaelneale• 17 years ago

In general I agree - but for this specific issue I think it is valid. The performance of late has been terribly, about 40% of the time in my 20 minute window I have to access it are failed responses - so I am not checking back less and less.

I am not sure what else we are supposed to to - email pg and complain about its slowness ?? ;)

pg7• 17 years ago

Fortunately there's a setting for this:

(= nourl-factor* .1)

Better now?

wheels3• 17 years ago

Perhaps one tweak -- links back to news.ycombinator.com are weighted the same?

ajkirwin• 17 years ago

Please tell me that you seriously didn't just make it so that news articles without a link have 10% of the weight of news articles w/links.

davidw• 17 years ago

I've had trouble when I clicked on 'submissions' for a while, and now even 'threads' is getting pretty slow.

jansson• 17 years ago

Nope, it's working fine towards me.

geuis• 17 years ago

Yes, mainly when viewing my profile page.

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

The "threads" page is very slow for me but the front page is actually faster than it was a few weeks ago.

donniefitz2• 17 years ago

It's seems plenty fast to me. I'm on slow connection and I get snappy page loads.

zandorg• 17 years ago

Yes, sometimes it doesn't load, shows a blank page. I wonder if it's seeing malware from my machine, but clearly not given other eyewitness accounts.

corgan1003• 17 years ago

yup, did not load for 20 minutes just now

Rabidmonkey1• 17 years ago

I haven't had any trouble with it.

ilamont• 17 years ago

Yes. This morning around 9 or 10 (eastern) it was slow -- took many tens of second for indivual links or the main page to come up.

But it seems to be recent -- I can't recall it happening before this week.

Andys• 17 years ago

ARC doesn't scale!

walesmd• 17 years ago

It's the orange names :)

Yes, I've noticed a lot of slowdown as well, primarily when viewing comments.

jmtame• 17 years ago

the site feels like it's slowing down a lot, and this is even after the highlight name feature was removed. you guys read what happened when google made the tweaks to display more results right?

rw2• 17 years ago

Dear everyone:

Stop meta-referencing - go make something.

Ask HN: Is HN slow for you lately? Or even not responding?

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