Some sites (possibly hn too) do not display cached pages to authenticated users. This could be the reason you see a decrease in response time compared to when you're logged in.
Can't tell, but logging out to get the cached pages did seem to help... so maybe it's a lot of people all logged in hitting the same database each click?
Yes, that's normal. If you're not logged in, HN serves you a cached version that is a couple dozen seconds old. That's super fast. If you're logged in, HN has to generate the page based on the previous actions and properties of your account (e.g. upvotes, favourites, etc.) with every HTTP request.
As stated elsewhere it really seems to be a problem with the static content hosted on ycombinator.com (maybe they aren't being cached very well browser side).
I don't know how well something like a front end cache would do to speed up content delivery as I suspect news.yc has a lot more users logged in than normal websites which might take away the advantages of a front end cache.
I haven't noticed too much slowness lately...but I am guessing the web application's user sessions have been reset a few times over the past two days, as I keep having to log in even though my browser cookies are enabled correctly.
Maybe you're forgetting to test with a clean cache? Completely anecdotal, but I visited your site a few times on my phone and 2 loads with a cleaed cache were _way_ slower than the 2 without clearing the cache.
reply