p.s: I also saw an old post by pg about /unban?ip=. I tried that and got an unbanned/sorry response. But that didn't make any difference to the slowness I see. If my IP was indeed banned, I'm even more curious. I don't believe there's any abuse traffic coming my IP.
Hackernews is very lean and minimal which is why it can absorb huge amounts of traffic without a whimper. It doesn't serve images, mostly text instead, and I imagine the codebase is minimal too.
Now how to keep these up-to-date as new posts comes and ensure that they stay in sync? What about pages if you have comments there? Looking at code it seems "1 hours ago" is in the html, so would need some javascript or something to dynamically calculate that too..
Seems, much more fragile and error prone system compared to what is in use.
Adding a CDN would also complicate things, especially for logged in users. HN is server side rendered so they’d need to implement someway to bypass the cache for these users.
Plus, as the site is very discussion heavy, it’d need a very low TTL for cache expiry which would reduce the benefit.