Re:Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch
by gingerjoos on Thursday November 29, 2012 @09:22AM
(#4847783)
The blog mentions that they did have caching on with nginx (which is what Varnish does, isn't it?). The problems were because of nginx not caching the frontpage (configuration issue) and because there was an unexpected hit on solr.
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Re:Post mortem of a failed HackerNews launch
by danso on Thursday November 29, 2012 @09:41AM
(#4847893)
The unexpected hit was just users using the full text search, right? That probably should have been one of the first things tested as I assume that would be a bottleneck in speed in all stages of development...or at least it has been in my experience.
I often try to think of ways to not have full text search...this case is a little more difficult, but why not create a list of common recipe names (i.e. "grilled cheese" would be a facet for all grilled cheese sandwiches) and store it as a static json? It would take some taxonomy work on the backend but the list as JsON could easily be less than a MB and the. You wouldn't have to worry about full search as much...full search could still be an option, just not a top of the front page option.