Why is HN so often down?
It's daily now, that I'm seeing "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!", maybe even 10-20 times during different times.
From Europe, especially during the lunch break hours, HN is down again and again. For instance as of the past 30 minutes, I see the above message more often than the expected pages. It's been like that also yesterday, the day before that.
I understand that this happens often based on searching, but I don't remember having it that often in the past.
Honest question: what happens, why do we get that message, especially during these times? Is there something that is going on the the early AM hours in the US? Maintenance work maybe?
Edit based on some comments below:
- could it be this has to do with being logged in or not? I will try to stay less often logged in.
- dang wrote: "but for those who are comfortable logging in and out: HN gets a lot faster if you log out, and it will reduce the load on the server if you do" (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611)
- another reason could be rate limits, especially if not logged in
- rozenmd is monitoring HN, that looks awesome: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/
- "Did you post something negative about Google/DEI? Or maybe just upvote it? Or skim one of those threads. There you go. Time out for you." <---- this is particularly disturbing IF TRUE
I've been frequenting this site daily for over 15 years now, and I don't think I've had error messages more than a handful of times in that decade and a half. Today was indeed one such time - which is what triggered me to check out this particular post. But at least in my experience it's not what I'd call "often". Maybe you're just very unlucky, or perhaps I'm extremely lucky... Who can tell?
It is not often down, but it's very easy to hit its rate limiter when upvoting or commenting. Waiting a minute usually fixes it.
The rate limiter is even stricter when not logged in — for a period I wanted to take a break with getting into online arguments, so I stayed logged out, which would cause my IP to be banned after a day or two (a bit annoying, though easily unbanned with the self-service system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102) — IIRC dang confirmed that it would be better to stay logged in to avoid this anti-bot measure.
I guess that's the price to pay to have such a popular website that's maintained by a single person.
I've had that same message a couple of times over the last few days, while logged in (EU).
It's kind of expected behavior when there's a thread with thousands of comments (like when OpenAI shafts their CEO [0]), but the last few days seemed relatively calm.
So maybe the server is crumbling under the increase in traffic from higher HN rankings in Google [1]?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310213
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423949
It was down for me a bit today.
But it's a great free service with no tracking/ads so I'm fine with that.
I'm in Ghana, and can confirm that I'm seeing this a lot recently. Sometimes the problem persists even after multiple refreshes.
I'm almost always logged in, and it happens even when I have not visited HN in some hours.
I've noticed it too - also in Europe. It could be a result of increased traffic from a recent Google search algorithm update which increased HN's ranking significantly. I understand HN infrastructure isn't enormous, so it would make sense. HN ranking discussion here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423949
Dang said they're working on it, I presume they are upgrading the hardware soon or something... (edit: in any case they are aware and it hopefully shouldn't be an issue long term)
Same, it seems HN is getting more traffic but hasn't been keeping up with the load.
Which is interesting because YC has funded many infra companies.
I usually browse through hn.algolia.com and that has a much higher uptime than news.ycombinator.com
In 2024, it is surprising how often HN is unavailable.
I’m new but been checking HN for the past weeks daily, multiple times a day usually. I haven’t experienced this on any single of my visits. Weird.
Just guessing but I believe they run their own colocated infraestruture and don't have much or anything that autoscales, so if they're not overprovisioned enough and there's a lot of threads that have too many comments it happens. I also saw they are hiring for an infra engineer role so they might also be understaffed.
Consider the 'HN hug of death' we have patience for when a site linked on the front page is down.
HN must be getting orders of magnitude higher traffic than that constantly.
I remember I read somewhere here that it is recommended to log off your session when you do not need to stay online to comment or post something.
Backend upgrades I assume. The fact that this even exists, is free, is frequented, and has super valuable commentary is enough to make me wait. I get way more value out of HN than any other site I visit. It’s not my most frequented but it’s my most valued. Try not to compare it with a SaaS you pay for or that sells your information to pay for it.
Isn’t the general ethos here that HN doesn’t care about some number of 9’s of reliability? They just upgrade stuff when necessary and probably bang on prod a lot more than big corporate sites. HN is a nice to have, and keeping it that way allows it to remain administered by a small crew.
> what happens, why do we get that message
This message is a HTTP 500 error page. 5xx are backend unreachability-related, so likely "the app" dies and has a long-ish boot time, or start is delayed by waiting for cron event.
Not doubting the experiences of anyone else, but I have only been a daily user of this site for the past 18 months, but not once has it been down for me in the morning or evening when I reach for a dopamine hit.
Speculation – but Google moved HN up in search recently and I suspect that's resulted in a spike in traffic. I assume the downtime is capacity related.
I'm getting the same but only when using VPN. Not sure if there's a connection or just a correlation with me using the VPN during the day.
it's to remind you that there is no place like hn else where.
You might be clicking on a bunch of links at once (triggering some anti-ddos/spam measure?). Happened to me once or twice. I assumed it might have been because my dynamic ip had been "used by robots" prior.
Is there any open metrics on HN hits / usage etc? Curious on growth of this platform. For me is my #1 place I regularly go to each day. Other sites less important to hit frequently.
Go easy. The new hamster is taking a while to train up.
I was always under the impression it was a sort of shadowquasiban/shadowratelimit mechanic
it definitely shows up a lot more via vpn
Yeah, it’s been down for me somewhat regularly in recent months but I find the outages charming.
Same here in the last few days between 10 AM and 1 PM (CET)
I have never seen that message before. Also from Europe.
HN is my only way to see if something is down
Motivation for you to get back to work.
> ” Did you post something negative about Google/DEI? Or maybe just upvote it? Or skim one of those threads. There you go. Time out for you." <---- this is particularly disturbing IF TRUE”
This is bullshit. I am sorry you decided to edit your comment to include that paranoia. I am seeing these errors a lot and a lot of times it’s when I just get to the site without any interaction.
I usually comment very uncontroversial things and get the error all the same.
Ps: I don’t know what’s “DEI”
does this bother you or you are asking out of technical curiosity ?
I can’t believe that this elite community of techies are chiming in with the equivalent of “works on my machine” :-)
Used to happen whenever you criticized communist China so I assumed it wad an anti-naughty-posting feature. (Thankfully there’s been some relaxation on this, as evidenced by this post being visible.)
Might be worth considering moving the arch of the site to a SaaS solution like netlify to really benefit from the scaling capabilities of serverless.