We don't have more than one server and HN proper (not counting caches) runs on a single core.

Believe me, we hate slow software at least as much as you do and have put a lot of effort into addressing this. HN is a lot faster than it used to be on median load. It still falls short on excessive load. We'll get there!

> We don't have more than one server and HN proper (not counting caches) runs on a single core.

Well, then. That is rather impressive.

(Though I suggest adding a processor/server. Probably small compared to your existing Cloudflare costs.)

HN is still made in arc, right? Does arc support threads? Racket does, so I would assume arc does.

Racket has green threads, which gives us non-blocking IO but that's about it. There's another concurrency mechanism that uses OS threads but Arc doesn't rely on it, and from the little I looked at, I don't think it would work with the HN software's design.

There are two parallelism approaches in Racket, both of which provide OS threads. The most useful one for web servers is called 'places', and is somewhat like Erlang -- you can only communicate immutable serializable data between different places, as well as OS resources like file handles. I know other people have used places to scale web applications, but I haven't looked at how HN's design would be affected.

If you have questions about using this, please feel free to email me about it.

Clearly, it depends on the architecture used. From what dang says, it seems like HN renders every single page view dynamically if you are logged in. I guess that has something to do with the voting mechanism; I would have thought that could be handled client-side instead.

Either way, it's not just down to the number of comments on a thread, as you imply, clearly the number of requests for that page plays a part. I'm guessing HN has been getting a huge amount of traffic, probably way more than your laptop could serve dynamic pages at.

> I would have thought that could be handled client-side instead

It could be, but that would add a JavaScript dependency that HN currently doesn't have.

True. But it could be a 'progressive dependency' - i.e. you could still do everything you can now without javascript, it would just be used to hide the voting buttons/links/whatever else is dynamic.

I've enjoyed HN for years with great benefit, entirely for free, so thanks a million! I have great respect for you guys.

Said so... 2k comments, uncached render for logged in users and no pagination are a very low bar in 2016, especially for a YCombinator website.

edit: saw dang's comment below and wanted to make sure this doesn't come through as harsh :)

It's Trump's hug of death this time.

Trump's hugs have been quite newsworthy http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/donald-trump-a... Apparently he's bad at them.