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

[kmt]

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.

[jwesley]

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]

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.

[nihilocrat]

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.

[kmt]

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.

[pg]

Fortunately there's a setting for this:

(= nourl-factor* .1)

Better now?

[michaelneale]

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 ?? ;)

[jonursenbach]

This IS a message board.

[pg]

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.

[tlrobinson]

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

[Shamiq]

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

[lsb]

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

[andreyf]

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...

[jonursenbach]

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

[Shamiq]

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

Maybe that'll help.

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

[jacquesm]

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.

[pg]

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.

[gojomo]

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

[kmt]

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]

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

[brk]

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.

[ilamont]

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.

[zandorg]

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.

[ErrantX]

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

[davidw]

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

[fauigerzigerk]

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

[walesmd]

It's the orange names :)

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

[donniefitz2]

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

[jmtame]

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?

[raamdev]

Yes, not responding at random times.

[jansson]

Nope, it's working fine towards me.

[Rabidmonkey1]

I haven't had any trouble with it.

[rw]

Dear everyone:

Stop meta-referencing - go make something.

[corgan1003]

yup, did not load for 20 minutes just now