Title: I&#x27;m currently using an artificially-shaped 256k Internet connection (it resets in a couple days), and over the past few weeks browsing the web, I&#x27;ve very consistently found HN to be one of the fastest loading sites I&#x27;ve come across.<p>I understand that HN is built on top of Arc (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arclanguage.org), a Lisp variant, and that the code (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wting&#x2F;hackernews&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;news.arc) uses flat files to store post and vote data. This is generally speaking quite an unusual&#x2F;unexpected architecture for a site presumed to serve a consistently moderate load, but HN manages to do so remarkably well, presumably because the site itself is so incredibly lightweight. I don&#x27;t think the minimal HTML is the only factor though, although it probably counts for the majority.<p>I&#x27;m interested to understand as much as possible&#x2F;practicable&#x2F;relevant about the server(s&#x27;) configuration, uplink bandwidth, other tunables, etc, so I can get an idea of what makes HN so exceptionally responsive and &quot;a cut above 99% of everything else&quot;. Does CloudFlare <i>really</i> make <i>that</i> much of a difference? :P<p>I know there&#x27;s some &quot;secret sauce&quot; in there somewhere, because virtually-verbatim clones of HN such as http:&#x2F;&#x2F;firespotting.com&#x2F; seem <i>almost</i> as fast... but <i>just</i> not as instantaneous as HN.<p>(PS: On the occasions I get hit by it, my ISP&#x27;s shaping config seems quite involved&#x2F;nuanced, and I actually want to profile it because it&#x27;s so catalyzing and would be very useful to apply to my own projects for &quot;worst-case&quot; testing. For the interested, the details I have thus far can be found here: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverfault.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;709529&#x2F;how-can-i-profile-my-isps-bandwidth-shaping-settings)
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