HN Explorer

Ask HN: How does Hacker News load so quickly?

7 points by topcat31 ↗ HN
I know that it's a stripped down web-page with light HTML code but even so Hacker News loads faster than pretty much any other page I visit.

What does the infrastructure look like and how is it architected to load so quickly?

Apologies if this has already been discussed somewhere. I tried googling but didn't find anything written on it.

7 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 85.0 ms ] thread
[dead] cancelbubble
Funny, opening this particular page took ~ 17 seconds for me doing the mental one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand timing.

I have similar slowness hitting main pages and paginating.

Edit: Took ~ 8 seconds to save this and ~ 10 seconds to bring up this edit page.

LaaT
AFAIK there's no DB, everything stays on memory. In addition to that the HTML served is pretty minimal.
noahc
You might want to start here: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/rYKceEmOr/

You can make almost any page load quickly if you have only five requests and about 3kb of Images and CSS together.

Google's homepage is considered pretty minimal and yet it's images are 25 times the size of HN's and it has 14 requests.

topcat31
I guess, though with the amount of traffic the site gets it still loads super fast. Would bigger images/css really slow it down that much?
phaus
Yes. A file that is ten times larger will take ten times longer to load on the same connection.
AznHisoka
I feel the opposite.. sometimes HN takes so long to load than other pages.