Why HN Got Slow

Re:Why HN Got Slow by hoodoof on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @07:52PM (#2866031)

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by shadowmatter on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @07:55PM (#2866049)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by stevenp on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @07:52PM (#2866037)

Main-stream media.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by mainguy on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:53PM (#2866225)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by samstave on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @07:58PM (#2866058)

Slashdotted Digged Reddited

Pick one

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by yuvipanda on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:03PM (#2866071)

They aren't considered MSM.

NYT, Slate, Guardian, etc., rather.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by samstave on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:30PM (#2866154)

It was a historical reference

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by icefox on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:33PM (#2866320)

2nded, I haven't heard 'Slashdotted' to mean getting traffic from slashdot.org in a while, but it does seem to have stuck as the means of saying we got a ton of traffic from some other website linking to us.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by watmough on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:31PM (#2866161)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by jerrya on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:01PM (#2866062)

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by loire280 on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:45PM (#2866196)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by dvdhsu on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:58PM (#2866382)

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

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by ghshephard on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @12:55AM (#2866835)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by ComputerGuru on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @01:50AM (#2866941)

Why do you think iTunes would care what DNS server you are using? I'm genuinely curious, as I would think that the DNS lookups are abstracted by the OS, and even if they were not, I cannot see how using a different (esp. a better performing) DNS server would hinder iTunes performance — especially since the original DNS isn't provided by Apple or anything.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by ryannielsen on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @01:59AM (#2866963)

CDNs often rely on your DNS info to determine which node is closest to you and, thus, which node should offer the best performance.

Using a central DNS like Google's can do two things:

1) Break locality. Using 8.8.8.8 may cause CDNs to potentially direct you to a node that's nowhere near your actual physical location

2) Aggregate traffic on a node. The more people using 8.8.8.8 for DNS, the more people who may land on the CDN nodes associated with 8.8.8.8's location and thus that node may be more loaded than the one closer to you

[edit] Google even covers this in their Public DNS FAQ: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#cdn. They offer 31 different locations, while Akamai may offer thousands of nodes (I can't find hard numbers, but they refer to 1,200+ points of presence here http://www.akamai.com/hdonline and 1,000 networks here http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/edgeplatform.html). You're basically constraining yourself to a small subset of at least Akamai's CDN by using Google Public DNS.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by ComputerGuru on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @02:57AM (#2867064)

That completely slipped my mind. You are, of course, correct.

An alternative suggestion here is to use Comcast's 75.75.75.75 IP address; while it may seem static, it's actually an anycast address, and will resolve to the nearest node.

One thing many people forget when choosing a DNS server is that it's not just the ping time that counts - the time it takes the server to reply to the actual DNS request is what matters.

e.g. while 75.75.75.75 for me (Comcast Chicago) is a 15ms trip and 8.8.8.8 is a 28ms ping, the lookup on the former (dig x.com @dns_ip) can reach 120ms while on Google's DNS it never exceeds ~35ms.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by michaelcampbell on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @07:27AM (#2867711)

> CDNs often rely on your DNS info to determine which node is closest to you and, thus, which node should offer the best performance.

Why do they do this? Wasn't DNS SUPPOSED to be something that wasn't in any way tied to locality? Are CDN's just using the side effect/fact of life that they happened to fall out that way, because it's easier?

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by ComputerGuru on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @10:29AM (#2868339)

Pretty much, yes. But it's not just easier, it's also simpler. If you do the distribution at the DNS level (which is pretty much as low as you can go), you don't have to deal with the much messier geo-distribution on a higher level.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by blinkingled on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:50PM (#2866210)

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!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by Terretta on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:17PM (#2866287)

Was this an inside joke?[1]

1. http://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/steve-gibson-...

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510614

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by blinkingled on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:54PM (#2866371)

It wasn't - this is just a DNS benchmark that does DNS resolution in loop and measures how long it took etc. Nothing requiring security expertise.

Besides I don't understand why few people are after Gibson - he is generally on the mark - that's not to say he doesn't make mistakes - but nothing that makes me want to totally ignore him.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by jerrya on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:13PM (#2866281)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by known on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @04:07AM (#2867225)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by jerrya on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @05:28AM (#2867423)

Thank you.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by Vexenon on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:04PM (#2866073)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by jerrya on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:13PM (#2866106)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by kleeg on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:19PM (#2866114)

I figured I was getting Cox'd

That's what she said...

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by rdl on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:08PM (#2866089)

Will we have International Haskell Day later this week?

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by dschoon on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:43PM (#2866345)

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...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by niels_olson on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:49PM (#2866357)

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.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by bluehat on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @10:28PM (#2866462)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by Locke1689 on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:25PM (#2866305)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by nitrogen on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @12:12AM (#2866724)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by Joakal on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:48PM (#2866204)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by fname on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @07:56PM (#2866051)

Link to the article?

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by InfinityX0 on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:01PM (#2866064)

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..

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by ehsanu1 on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:02PM (#2866255)

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...

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by InfinityX0 on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:16PM (#2866285)

Ah, I was using Yahoo! Site Explorer as a judge.. which only showed PCWorld. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGk.jo20F...

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by JoeCortopassi on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:56PM (#2866232)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by jvehent on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:48PM (#2866206)

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 :)

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by jbseek on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @07:40PM (#2866001)

Thanks PG, you must wear many hats.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by LearnYouALisp on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @07:11PM (#2870621)

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.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by kunley on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @07:24AM (#2867699)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by dennisgorelik on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:04PM (#2866260)

Can caching help?

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by pitdesi on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:05PM (#2866078)

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?

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by pbhjpbhj on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @08:43PM (#2866194)

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.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by alex_c on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:31PM (#2866319)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by niels_olson on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:51PM (#2866364)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by nitrogen on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @12:08AM (#2866707)

This would be a good start: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

What amazes me is that as much as I read HN, there are still people in the top 10 whose comments and submissions I've never seen. I wonder if they got all their karma years ago and it's taking this long for everyone else to catch up.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why HN Got Slow by JoachimSchipper on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @09:50AM (#2868152)

To be fair, some of them mostly submit stories (compare e.g. tptacek and fogus; the first has lots of comments but few stories, the other is the other way round.)

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by niels_olson on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @04:07PM (#2869939)

That's almost exactly what I'm not interested in. There are some very interesting people with account who post very infrequently, but their comments, in the context of who they are, is very interesting indeed.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by d_rwin on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @02:32AM (#2867027)

true to the word. " What would you believe , maximus?"

community tagging could not be the solution here- what do you think?

--Stackoverflow blog offers some explanation.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by Sundog on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @10:37PM (#2866488)

So...we're Digg then?

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by Sundog on Wednesday August 10, 2011 @03:43PM (#2869854)

Yikes...THAT wasn't the right to say

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by zobzu on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @09:11PM (#2866273)

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.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by graywh on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @11:12PM (#2866572)

There's no down voting on articles. And for karma, 1 vote = 1 point.

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by melling on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @07:41PM (#2866003)

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

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Re:Why HN Got Slow by benologist on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @07:46PM (#2866013)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]