Track HN: Downtime visualized | Hacker News Reader

Track HN: Downtime visualized

hnstatus.net

38 pointsmoe42 comments

And such start the trend of measuring metrics. The next logical step is to measure when hnstatus.net is up/down.

Yes. How meta of us. :)

How many times in history has a change in the state of a community's forum turned into a dominating discussion onto itself?

When I had probs with HN today, the first thing I did was a twitter search which confirmed it wasn't just me.

What does the graph mean? I see a red rectangle next to a white rectangle. Is the red rectangle downtime? Surely not...

Further, what's the y axis?

It looks like it's just up or down on the y-axis. RRDTool is often used to generate more complex graphs, so something this simple isn't always the most intuitive.

The monitor checks HN once per minute and records a 0 for up or a 1 for down in the database.

RRDTool then averages these values out nicely so that, for example, when the graph is at weekday-resolution and you see a 50% filled bar spanning one day, then HN was down half of that day.

Since it's running on CEST (Central European Standard Time), and just for today, yes, the red bar is downtime.

It was indeed down in the early morning.

I just asked Trevor what was going on. Apparently we turned off the restart-HN process back when we were hacked a few days ago, and we forgot to turn it back on. Things should be back to normal now.

I just asked Trevor what was going on.

Now you got me really confused. I assumed tlb==Trevor.

Oops, that was me. I was using Trevor's computer when I typed that.

I've seen an app like this before ..

My recollection was that it was generalized so that a user could specify a site, and the app would say whether the site was up or not .. but it did not monitor to let you know when it was back up ..

Combining the two would make a very handy tool .. to be able to monitor when any site is back up ..

You're probably thinking of http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/; You're right, though, continuous monitoring would be very handy for some sites.

Yeah, that's the one ..

I tried checking if "downforeveryoneorjustme.com" was down using itself. Looks like the developper saw that coming :)

When I checked, it said it was just down for me.

Are you referring to HN during the earlier downtime?

The server still seemed to be responding, it was just empty. (I didn't check the headers, so I don't know specifically what if anything was happening.) I believe dfeojm works by checking whether you get a response or not, so as far as it could tell HN was still up.

Are you referring to HN during the earlier downtime?

Yes. Thanks.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/news.ycombinator.com

It was developed by Alex Payne of Twitter (@al3x), in the days when twitter had about 90% uptime, if I recall correctly.

I use http://mon.itor.us/ to track our status.

I seem to often see the site, but when I click threads, I get nothing. Or sometimes on the homepage I get just one story.

Cache? Opera instantly gets page from cache when I press "Back", even if I don't have internet connection.

I am finding that HN is down more often these days. Is it because of occasional spikes or is it a persistent occurrence. Perhaps pg could explain what's going on under the hood?

I find it handy when HN goes down. Lets me get some work done. :)

I on the other hand become further unproductive. I keep coming back every 30 seconds to see if it’s up again and end up doing nothing at all.

That's what hnstatus.net is for. Put it in a tab and the title will tell you within a minute when HN comes back.

I'd say that's a sign you probably should block yourself from HN for a while. Any time that I notice that I'm getting too compulsive about a particular site I add it to a blocked list and leave it there for a week or two. I'm also a huge fan of Freedom.app for disconnecting my internet for blocks of time where I notice that I'm too easily distracted.

the freedom app seems interesting, does it have windows/linux equivalents?

Not that I know of, but it's a pretty trivial app. It just removes all of the default routing. Sure, I could probably add them back, but I've intentionally never learned how to use the BSD route that comes with Mac OS for that reason. :-)

With Linux, actually, you could probably go one level lower by writing a small kernel driver that you could signal from user space to disable networking for a given period and then do some goofiness so that it couldn't be unloaded effectively and still get networking back.

Or you could just knuckle down and work. I cant think of many times a site justified more than a few visits a day

It's like a global noprocrast. Let's take the next leap and add support for a 'global noprocrast vote'. If more people vote 'yes' than vote 'no', the site goes down for an hour.

A few days ago when that guy hacked the site, we turned off the process that restarts News when it gets wedged, and we forgot to turn it back on.

Why?

What gets measured gets managed. :)

why not?

When hacker news is down, it creates the "I must not waste my time pressing F5" effect.

Or ctrl + R

Or cmd + R

It might be useful to add what timezone that time actually refers to. Unless we sometime soon have downtime which spans several days which makes the +-12 margin irrelevant.

Yes, I already have plans for some future lazy sunday. I'll probably add "last 24 hours", "3 days" etc. graphs for a better grip.

Unless ofcourse pg fixes the downtimes - that would kinda pull the plug on my little pet project here.

Unless ofcourse pg fixes the downtimes

Sheesh - it's a free service on the internet, used (amongst other things) as a vehicle for the new language he's working on. I think you're setting your expectations a bit off.

What does the graph really provide? We know when it's down -- Just seems like griping for me.

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