Tell HN: GZIP for Hacker News

39 points by mhusby 15 years ago | 5 comments

http://quickhn.appspot.com/

I got really tired of it taking forever to load HN when I was on EDGE so I took things into my own hands :-) Its just a simple proxy using google app engine, but it does gzip the pages. On a sample page with 103 comments the size went from 140.0K to 29.8K. All other features are functioning (submit new, upvoting, commenting).

The source is on github so feel free to deploy your own: https://github.com/matthusby/HN-Proxy

stevenp 15 years ago |

Wow. Why on Earth is HN not already being served gzipped? The performance difference is drastic.

mhusby 15 years ago | |

I am not sure on the details, but it has something to do with the server that they are running. Whatever the server is it doesn't do gzip or ssl, but the proxy does both :-)

rick_2047 15 years ago | | |

The server itself is written in arc and as is news.arc, the server was written to "just work".

andrewstuart 15 years ago |

You'd think they'd stick a proxy in front of the HN server to compress.

_delirium 15 years ago | |

I recall reading a comment from Graham somewhere that one of the goals of the experiment with news.arc was to show that a "slow" language can serve a high-traffic website directly, with appropriate optimization and caching in its design, without having to be "protected" by something like Varnish or Squid in front of it.