Ask HN: Cache the frontpage links on HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6507086

by JeroenRansijn • 13 years ago

10 10 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It really annoys me when the links on the frontpage of HN are clicked on so much they overload the server of that website. What about a website/service which caches all the pages on the frontpage of HN, and throws them away after X amount of time after they disappear from the frontpage. If you think this is a good idea, me and my co-worker might create something like this.

petercooper• 13 years ago

I think a lot of content providers would not be keen on this as a default mode of operation. They'd lose stats, access to dynamic stuff on the page, and more.

On the other hand, if HN could frequently check if a page is still responsive and, if not, then show a cached version until it's back up, that would be awesome, but given the underlying software doesn't get many updates anyway, I doubt we'd see anything like this soon.

dutchbrit• 13 years ago

I think it's a bad idea, mainly because I'd like to see how much traffic my site received. It occasionally happens that I want to read something here, but the server is down. In that case, I always Google the URL. So far, in all cases, Google has spidered and cached the URL I wanted to access.

People would be better off optimizing their site/server. It's a good lesson to see what happens when your site gets a boost in traffic.

Shish2k• 13 years ago

if(site doesn't respond) {link.domain_name = link.domain_name + ".nyud.net"}

arb99• 13 years ago

It wouldn't be hard to run every submitted link through http://www.coralcdn.org/, then if the site goes down add a comment to the thread linking to their .nyud.net address (eg http://google.com.nyud.net/ )

gojomo• 13 years ago

I love Coral CDN... and could see it being a model for (or supporting-part) of a generalized cache-popular-submissions solution. But, it seems it doesn't support HTTPS sites.

bencevans• 13 years ago

Check this out http://hncache.bensbit.co.uk/

JeroenRansijn• 13 years ago

Fantastic, although the extension doesn't work for me? Does it work for the latest Chrome?

edent• 13 years ago

Or, before submitting their* sites, they could do the bare minimum of 1) Use the free version of CloudFare or similar. 2) Get a web host with unlimited / high bandwidth levels. 3) If using WordPress, use one of the many cacheing plugins.

I've been hit several times by being on the front page. By my estimates, that worth around 700 requests per hour (http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/whats-the-front-page-of-hack...). I don't think that's excessive and using the above, my bog standard WordPress install has never fallen over.

*I'm aware not all stories are submitted by their writer - but I consider the above to be best practice for any competent website owner.

moreentropy• 13 years ago

I think it's good when it hurts.

It's better to struggle with the hacker news treatment early on and learn to cope with traffic spikes than have the same problems when your site gets mainstream coverage.

haliphax• 13 years ago

If they use varnish on their end, the problem solves itself. :)

Ask HN: Cache the frontpage links on HN?

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