Ask HN: How does Hacker News load so quickly?

Posted by topcat31 on Monday May 07, 2012 @11:34AM
from the ask-hn dept.

I know that it's a stripped down web-page with light HTML code but even so Hacker News loads faster than pretty much any other page I visit.

What does the infrastructure look like and how is it architected to load so quickly?

Apologies if this has already been discussed somewhere. I tried googling but didn't find anything written on it.

( 6 comments | 7 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: How does Hacker News load so quickly? by AznHisoka on Monday May 07, 2012 @01:01PM (#3939846)

I feel the opposite.. sometimes HN takes so long to load than other pages.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How does Hacker News load so quickly? by Ineffable on Tuesday May 08, 2012 @05:22AM (#3942853)

Try Reddit.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How does Hacker News load so quickly? by noahc on Monday May 07, 2012 @12:58PM (#3939837)

You can make almost any page load quickly if you have only five requests and about 3kb of Images and CSS together.

Google's homepage is considered pretty minimal and yet it's images are 25 times the size of HN's and it has 14 requests.

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Re:Ask HN: How does Hacker News load so quickly? by topcat31 on Monday May 07, 2012 @01:45PM (#3940070)

I guess, though with the amount of traffic the site gets it still loads super fast. Would bigger images/css really slow it down that much?

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Re:Ask HN: How does Hacker News load so quickly? by phaus on Monday May 07, 2012 @05:53PM (#3941136)

Yes. A file that is ten times larger will take ten times longer to load on the same connection.

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Re:Ask HN: How does Hacker News load so quickly? by LaaT on Monday May 07, 2012 @12:58PM (#3939833)

AFAIK there's no DB, everything stays on memory. In addition to that the HTML served is pretty minimal.

[ Parent | on HN ]