That's not the bottleneck. Essentially there's an in-memory database (known as h... | Hacker News

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pg on Jan 19, 2011 | parent | context | favorite | on: Why HN was slow and how Rtm fixed it

That's not the bottleneck. Essentially there's an in-memory database (known as hash tables). Stuff is lazily loaded off disk into memory, but most of the frequently needed stuff is loaded once at startup.

The bottleneck is the amount of garbage created by generating pages. IIRC there is some horrible inefficiency involving UTF-8 characters.

gills on Jan 19, 2011 | [–]

Are you using any sort of in-memory fragment caching? That seems like it might reduce some render overhead.

pg on Jan 19, 2011 | | [–]

A great deal, and it does.

svlla on Jan 19, 2011 | | [–]

perhaps continuations could be used more judiciously as well

ezalor on Jan 19, 2011 | [–]

> That's not the bottleneck.

What is the main bottleneck of HN?

pg on Jan 19, 2011 | [–]

See the second paragraph.

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