HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is Hacker News slow today (2021-10-04)?

49 points by systems ↗ HN
Is HN slow today, or is it just me I loging in from Canada

32 comments

[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 86.0 ms ] thread
detaro
yes, very likely because of the Facebook outage and more people coming here to check.
byoung2
I was having trouble with Facebook and came here and saw this post and your comment!
azhenley
Yes. Clicking "new" or submitting a story is giving me an error too.
etimberg
Most of the internet seems slow today
vadfa
Sorry guys. I'll log out now.
0wis
Yes, had trouble login, it took 3 attempts.
shkkmo
It's not just slow, I gotten a large number of error pages in the last hour or so. Prior to that it was working fine.

Edit: The error page says "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!" and I get it once out of every 3 or 4 requests.

cedivad
I want to see what a truly organic traffic jump looks like in a graph, please, admins?
ASalazarMX
Not an admin, but it probably looks like this:

      .--.
      |   \
      |    \
    __|     \__
p4bl0
It is slow from France too.
rock_artist
For us in GMT it was fine through the day. Guess the latest events of Facebook resulted additional stress on routes/servers related to HN
daggersandscars
Thanks to Detaro for pointing out that login status changes performance!

Leaving the comment below, but that's the answer.

----

If I access HN from a web browser that blocks all known ad-related sites (including FB), HN is as fast as normal.

If I access HN through my "regular" browser, it's very slow. This looks like HN timing out trying to hit FB more than load making it slow.

kgwxd
It's slow for me from FireFox with uBO. When has the HN site ever hit an FB url? I don't see any references to any FB related urls in source, uBO, or dev tools.
daggersandscars
Firefox + uBlock Origin on MacOS: fast, zero error pages. Safari, no adblocker: slow, error pages.

Looking at uBO, it's not reporting blocking anything on the page. Yet the performance difference is real. Weird.

detaro
are you logged in in both? if not, you are getting cached pages which can be served faster.
daggersandscars
Thanks! I did not know HN serves "fresh" pages when logged in.
randycupertino
Facebook products are down, hackernews is slow and reddit is slow! Mondays, amiright?
woodruffw
It's very slow on the US East Coast. Most requests time out at least once and then succeed after a retry.
JohnFen
It's painfully slow for me on the west coast of the US
actually_a_dog
I wonder if the fact that I can't access HN from my wifi networks' IP address is related. If I use a VPN or a different wifi network, all is good. But, on my home network, it just times out. :/
cwkoss
We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!