So my bad experience is clearly the combination of two things: HN is slow generating pages, taking something like one third of second to generate the home page. Add this to the latency and you are half a second for the home, and more for than 600 ms for comment pages.
This in the UK. In Italy there is apparently also some bandwidth issue, and since the markup is pretty verbose compared to the content, this could be dramatically improved too.
For instance Google.co.uk is served in 73 ms from the same place.
My blog takes 300 ms from my crappy ASDL (the same where hacker news takes 1.4 seconds).
Site seems to have slowed for me too now. Especially the front page. Gzip would probably help with the bandwidth issue but I don't think that's at fault.
I wonder if pg would accept a yc news written in python/redis :)
So I tried form UK (linode server):
https://gist.github.com/820303
Ping latency from linode is 100 ms.
So my bad experience is clearly the combination of two things: HN is slow generating pages, taking something like one third of second to generate the home page. Add this to the latency and you are half a second for the home, and more for than 600 ms for comment pages.
This in the UK. In Italy there is apparently also some bandwidth issue, and since the markup is pretty verbose compared to the content, this could be dramatically improved too.
For instance Google.co.uk is served in 73 ms from the same place.
My blog takes 300 ms from my crappy ASDL (the same where hacker news takes 1.4 seconds).
There are huge margins for improvements.