Ask HN: Has HN been loading slow lately?

3 points by girishso ↗ HN
HN used to be the fastest site to load on the internets. It's been loading (really) slowly for the past few days. Is it my internet?

3 comments

[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 9.9 ms ] thread
I think it may be on your end or something in between. HN has been snappy for me and I visit it daily. Have you tried opening the web developer console in the browser to see what is taking a long time? Tools -> Web Developer -> Web Console -> Network tab in Firerox

If you have curl, you could try this:

  #!/bin/bash
  set -o posix
  TIMEFORMAT=%R
  time curl -# \
  --connect-timeout 4 --retry 2 \
  -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0" \
  -H "Accept-Charset: UTF-8" \
  -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" \
  -H "Accept: */*" \
  -H "Accept-Language: en" \
  -H "Cache-Control: 0" \
  -H "Connection: keep-alive" \
  -w "# tcp:\t\t%{time_connect}\n# tries:\t%{num_connects}\n# dns:\t\t%{time_namelookup}\n# ssl:\t\t%{time_appconnect}\n# size_dl:\t%{size_download}\n# speed_dl:\t%{speed_download}\n# url:\t\t%{url_effective}\n# total:\t%{time_total}\n# Real Time:\t" \
  -o /dev/null https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt
The reason I suggest using robots.txt is so that multiple people can run that and compare notes to something constant.

Here is my output:

  ./test.sh
  ######################################################################## 100.0%
  # tcp:          0.066
  # tries:        1
  # dns:          0.004
  # ssl:          0.484
  # size_dl:      158
  # speed_dl:     285.000
  # url:          https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt
  # total:        0.554
  # Real Time:    0.569
Thanks, here's my output

  ######## 100.0%
  # tcp:  0.322244
  # tries: 1
  # dns:  0.001493
  # ssl:  0.905716
  # size_dl: 158
  # speed_dl: 134.000
  # url:  https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt
  # total: 1.176158
  # Real Time: 1.195
Firefox dev tools screenshot https://ibb.co/9G75JsH
The TCP and SSL handshake are pretty high if you are in the U.S. HN is hosted in San Diego. Are you by chance on a wireless network?