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Ask HN: Why is HN down so frequently?

7 points by rankam ↗ HN
Apologies if this has been asked and answered before, but HN seems to be down quite frequently and I am curious as to why. For instance, I visited earlier today and it was down. However, I rarely see any other sites that I frequent offline, though I will admit I visit HN far more than any other so it could be my own observation bias. Any insight would be appreciated - thanks!

6 comments

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canadaj
I noticed it was down a bit earlier as well, but I wouldn't say HN is down frequently. In fact, I can only think of today's incident and maybe one other where HN was down without any kind of advanced notice.
piyush_soni
Yes, 'frequent' can be a relative term, but I see it down once every few days.
krapp
It's some guy's weekend project that took off, and it's too clever to use plebian nonsense like a database.
rankam
It doesn't? I had no idea, I guess I just assumed it did.
krapp
Someone will probably some along and explain it in detail, but as I roughly maybe understand it, Hacker News stores everything as Lisp closures in RAM, which fills up frequently. So every now and then, it sort of has to be turned over and emptied out, like a toaster.

..and as flat files to disk. But not a database.