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Comment by gdulli | Hacker News Reader

OKCupid is the only web site I can think of that has a regular, not occasional, pattern of being very slow and simply not responding to an unusual number of requests. Hitting F5 to reload a page just to get it to show up instead of the Firefox server unavailable message is a regular part of my usage of the site.

Even though all sites have bugs, broken links, what have you, I don't know any other site that's given me such an expectation that it will be unresponsive for a significant number of page views for any given session over a long term period. Even the sites that started development circa 2003.

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I can only speak for myself, but I've pretty much never seen OkC perform like you're describing, and I've maintained an intermittently active account since '04.

We rarely get complaints such as this one. Would you mind helping me debug it?

How?

Send an email to userfeedback@okcupid.com, subject: gdulli, and I'll ask you to visit a few links. Thanks a lot, I really appreciate the help!

I get similar issues (long page loads, extremely large lag in chat and questions), while via 3G in Poland. It's not solely 3G's fault, because many other sites (including FB chat) work ok, but it's clearly triggered by a specific environment.

With landline connections OKC works very well :-)

Every time I had problems with okc it was due to broken transparent caching on wireless, cellular, or satellite networks.

Once in a while I find Chromes rendering engine slow down trying to render multiple OKC pages at once. Similar to trying to view TechCrunch only not nearly as bad.

Have you never used reddit?

That's a great example for comparison. Sometimes reddit goes down completely, maybe more often than most web apps. But it's still uncommon enough that I think of reddit as a site that "works" and I go into a session expecting it to go smoothly.

I don't think I've ever seen OkCupid down completely, not that I use it nearly as often as reddit. But I've never seen reddit have the behavior that while it's up, I can expect one of every 5-20 page views or posts to time out or fail on the first load/submit but succeed on the second or third. And this is consistent enough with OKCupid that I think about a usage session as something I'll have to be in the mood to fight with.

I see the "you broke reddit", "reddit is under heavy load" and "there doesn't seem to be anything here" messages nearly every day.

I've used okc for years and have never noticed this.

Sounds like you have never experienced Facebook like I do. I only spend about five minutes on it daily and it is all reloads and multiple clicks.

It may sound glib, but I would expect that you've described their ideal user behavior.

Damn!

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