Ask HN: How does Hacker News load so quickly?

7 pointsby topcat3114 anni fa6 comments

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

AznHisoka14 anni fa

I feel the opposite.. sometimes HN takes so long to load than other pages.

Ineffable14 anni fa

Try Reddit.

noahc14 anni fa

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.

topcat3114 anni fa

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?

phaus14 anni fa

Yes. A file that is ten times larger will take ten times longer to load on the same connection.

LaaT14 anni fa

AFAIK there's no DB, everything stays on memory. In addition to that the HTML served is pretty minimal.

cancelbubble14 anni fa