LessWrong is currently in the process of migrating from AWS to Vercel, as part of a project to migrate our codebase to NextJS[1]. This post should go live shortly after we cut over traffic to the new host (and updated codebase). This should hopefully be a pretty low-risk operation. If all goes well, we plan on doing the DNS cutover next week, which is a higher-risk[2] operation. (If we notice something terribly wrong we might roll back without warning.)
This is all to say that there's a higher-than-usual chance that you'll run into some new bugs, bumpiness, or performance degradation[3] in the next few days. If you do, please report them to us. The best way to do this via Intercom. You should[4] see this icon in the bottom-right corner of your screen:
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Bug reports ideally include "when did you first encouter the bug" and "what were you doing at the time", but don't worry about writing an essay, if we have questions we'll just ask.
You should feel free to report pre-existing bugs, just please let us know if you're reporting a bug which you're pretty sure was around before today.
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"Why" is a longer story that we might get into in the comments if people are curious.
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If something goes wrong here, some fraction of users might see downtime on the order of an hour, if they happen to be behind some piece of infrastructure which doesn't honor short DNS TTLs. (We've ensured that the DNS TTL is set to 60 seconds a few days ahead of time.)
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I expect a moderate performance hit for e.g. initially loading the front page on a new tab, maybe on the order of 20-30%, at least until we get around to optimizing that harder. If you're on a fast internet connection, this should hopefully not be very noticeable - our median front page load is under 1 second. If you run into something that seems to take longer than it used to, in a way that's perceptible to you, please err on the side of letting us know. It might end up being nothing, or might be too costly to fix in the short-term, but we can't perform triage if we don't know about the problems in the first place.
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Unless you've hidden it in your account settings.