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Why HN was slow and how Rtm fixed it

(ycombinator.com)
257 points pg | 2 comments | 19 Jan 11 18:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.424s | source
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earle ◴[19 Jan 11 19:06 UTC] No.2120831[source]▶
HN only supports 20 req per second???
replies(3): >>2120860 #>>2120867 #>>2121955 #
PStamatiou ◴[19 Jan 11 19:14 UTC] No.2120860[source]▶
flat files, no database
replies(1): >>2120885 #
pg ◴[19 Jan 11 19:22 UTC] No.2120885[source]▶
That's not the bottleneck. Essentially there's an in-memory database (known as hash tables). Stuff is lazily loaded off disk into memory, but most of the frequently needed stuff is loaded once at startup.

The bottleneck is the amount of garbage created by generating pages. IIRC there is some horrible inefficiency involving UTF-8 characters.

replies(3): >>2120907 #>>2120945 #>>2121444 #
1. gills ◴[19 Jan 11 22:00 UTC] No.2121444[source]▶
Are you using any sort of in-memory fragment caching? That seems like it might reduce some render overhead.
replies(1): >>2121617 #
2. pg ◴[19 Jan 11 22:51 UTC] No.2121617[source]▶
A great deal, and it does.