Is HN slow today?
What's normally the snappiest site on the web has been consistently taking ~5 seconds for each page load today. Extra traffic due to Slack being down, perhaps?
Yes, 'Who Is Hiring' days strain our server in general and there are a lot of other things going today, like Slack being down and the holidays being over. (Edit: and one mammoth 500-comment subthread that I've since split in two.)
Sorry. I hate slow software.
Edit: for the time being, I've lowered the number of comments that get rendered per page. That's helping some. It means you'll all have to click more More links at the bottom of threads to see all the comments. One day this will all be better.
It's not just you...
I posted the following in the "Slack Down Completely" article (before this article was posted):
>"For some reason, today, HN seems exceedingly exceedingly slow (to me) after logging in...
Without being logged in, things are as fast as they usually are -- but post log-in, SLOWWWER THAN MOLASSESS...
I tried this several times; why this is, I can only wonder...
To quote Bill and Ted... "Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K..." "
I think this is normal, when ever a crucial Internet services or Network is down. That could be Azure, GCP, AWS, Verisign, Cloudflare, DNS attack etc.
A huge number of people comes to HN to check status. To the point HN report network / services condition earlier than any mainstream or social media. (Including their own Status Update pages ) Last time it was Google ( Storage Limit )
This time it is Slack.
Not sure if this is related, but a traceroute is showing a lot of hops between my router and HN.
Me -> My ISP -> (Cogent: AMS -> PAR -> BIO -> PAR -> BIO -> DCA -> JFK -> DCA -> ATL -> DCA -> IAH -> ELP -> PHX -> SAN) -> HN
Yes, same here. I'm wondering if it is the post holiday rush? Everyone back to work and getting on HN (and Slack and YouTube and everything else that seems slow today)?
My guess is theres some sort of yet to be identified global issue. Seems Comcast has been spotty in parts of the US, slack is down, youtube was briefly inaccessible for me, etc.
I'm definitely betting on the slack outage factoring in here. HN is my go-to to see if I'm the only one having an issue, and slack being down is distracting enough, and disruptive enough, that I'm definitely guilty of browsing HN more than I normally would, even for the first day back after a holiday break.
The same question was asked when Google was down. Apparently this leads to a surge of traffic to HN because everyone wants to know what’s up and this causes the slowdown. The recommended ‘solution’ is to log out so that HN can serve you with the static version of the site.
I think there may also be a general surge for HN since it's the "back to work" day after the holidays. Perhaps some largish portion of HN users didn't use it much over the holidays and are catching up on reading.
I've had some applications down today. The initial reports are date related issues with the New Year. I suspect that's incorrect given it's Jan 4, but an anecdote nonetheless.
Markedly slower than usual here - South Wales, UK - and has been for a couple of hours.
Edited to add: as per comment by @peter_d_sherman all slowness disappears if using the site without being logged in.
Notion is sending out emails that their outage/slowdown is due to AWS outages but AWS status board is green and I haven't seen slack or anyone else claiming aws issues.
> For the last couple hours, Notion has been down. This is related to some difficulties Amazon Web Services is experiencing today. As of right now, our engineering team is all hands on deck working to restore service. We're confident these issues will be resolved soon, but in the meantime I'm so sorry for any problems or inconvenience this has caused. I know this is not ideal as everyone returns from break, and we'll be thoroughly investigating how to prevent outages like this in the future.
I use Hacker News as a quick benchmark for "how fast is the Internet here?" because the speed is so consistently good. Typically slow Hacker News load = slow Internet.
For me it was fine an hour or so ago when someone mentioned it in the Slack discussion, but it has steadily gotten more laggy as time goes on. It's sluggish now.
Yes. Page loads about 10 seconds, posts about 20 seconds.
I haven't noticed it being slow but it is better then failing completely at rendering the page (when it's under a heavy load).
Noticed this as well.
Edit: 7+ seconds to add a comment.
it isnt just HN. Slack is down, Notion (who is already slow) is somehow even slower today.
Plenty snappy for me, although I wasn't on much this morning.
Yeah, it took 5+ seconds to load this page.
Edit: And 5 more to edit this comment
I saw some errors on HN yesterday, for what it’s worth.
Commenting seems gone now, too, links to search wtf?
Yea the slackers are not slacking today lol
Doesn't HN run on a single computer under some desk? I heard this one time but never verified. Maybe it's time for a proper cloud deployment?