8 ms·
HN itself is fast, but the comparison I'm making is with readers that use the HN API. See how getting each comment requires an additional API request: https://h
by ers35 7y ago
HN itself is fast, but the comparison I'm making is with readers that use the HN API. See how getting each comment requires an additional API request: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22481199.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22481199.json?pri...
It's more about the consistency of operating on data local to the user. For example, see this comment referencing how HN paginates threads at 250 comments for performance reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231055 A local database does not have that issue.
- floatingatoll 7y agoAh, okay, so it's more about having to initiate thousands of requests for a single page than so much about the latency of any single request in those thousands — because even if they were all to a local server, that's still terribly inefficient, and with latency it's even worse. Thanks!
- dang 7y agoIn case it's helpful: we're going to make a new HN API that will be much easier to use. The idea is that adding something like "json/" to any HN URL will return a JSON version of that page. Curiously enough, we should also be able to eliminate the pagination of comments by then as well. Both changes are waiting on some software work that we expect to improve performance significantly. I don't know when this will all be done, but I hope it's this year.