Why Is HN Having Trouble Servicing Us More Often Recently?

Question

I seem to receive this page: "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" quite often lately.

k310 · Accepted Answer

Because Sam Altman was fired and it blew up the server.
OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman (openai.com) 3939 points by davidbarker 1629 comments.
The admins had to paginate the comments.
Other than that, who knows? When sites are slow, I hop over to HN because it's the fastest to respond, being text-based, and it tells me that the internet is awake.

gjsman-1000 · Answer

Hacker News does not rely on any public cloud infrastructure; and uses a completely bespoke web framework and (I believe) bespoke programming language. Scaling that setup is hard.

rozenmd · Answer

The website response time seems to have peaked during the OpenAI drama last night: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/

runjake · Answer

When this happens, log out of HN or load HN in Incognito Mode (not logged in), and you'll get fast page loads by hitting the front end cache.

wmf · Answer

Arc Doesn't Scale&trade;

slater · Answer

cos it's still running off an old server. that and bigger news stories lately, so the YC data center currently likely resembles the fields around Ypres, ca. 1918

nittanymount · Answer

it is said, it is a "poor single-core server"