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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

> HN is hosted on M5 Computer Security

Do we know if it is just like, one tall MySQL instance and a few RubyOnRails API instances? Not sure what would be used for "caching" as well.

> The load issues usually happen when a few popular threads have a really high comment count and dang usually has to enable pagination or other things to compensate.

Why not auto-turn it on at like 500 comments or so?

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Do we know if it is just like, one tall MySQL instance and a few RubyOnRails API instances?

Two servers, one active and one standby. Both running Arc on BSD. No MySQL or Ruby.

Why not auto-turn it on at like 500 comments or so?

Best to ask dang directly on that one hn@ycombinator.com as I have never seen the code and responsible adults don't let me near their code.

It always surprises me that a VC that has backed multiple tech unicorns can't run a scalable web site.

Considering all the trash that comes with heading in that direction (as has been repeatedly demonstrated by social media which has started off similarly to HN, only to turn around and shit on the people that helped them get going), I'm perfectly fine with a site that slows down a bit in special circumstances.

It's not like they can go grab employees from one of their funded companies to go work on HN, and they've clearly been happy with the results of their level of engineering investment in HN.

(Besides, as Reddit is showing, do you want your discussion site run like a tech unicorn? Arguably things were better for users in the skeleton crew days)

I always felt like scalability and growth aren't goals here, which is something I like to be honest.

This must be a major funnel for them. The fact they can't even run a robust text-only website ought to be an embarrassment, but here we are. Every time there's a major tech story the site grinds to a halt until one guy jumps onto a server and ninjas it or whatever. Unprofessional to say the least.

It's actually pretty impressive that they are running this from one server in their own programming language

Sure. Maybe they do the same as VCs. Use limited crappy resources in their own non-standard way to cripple growth.

What kind of reaction is that?

HN is written in Arc, an experimental lisp dialect created by Paul Graham. I believe it runs on a single instance? Not sure though.

I believe pagination does turn on automatically at 500 comments.

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