logoalt Hacker News

shartsyesterday at 6:26 PM7 repliesview on HN

I would take what C-level execs say with a grain of salt. Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience. They likely also have the money for hardware resources.

If load was an issue these things would have been solved already. Or they are purposely causing millions of dollars of productivity loss daily by not solving this.

Something more serious is at play. And I want to hear from the actual underlings.


Replies

Illniyartoday at 6:31 PM

More load does not just mean needing to increase capacity, which would be simple for Microsoft to do.

Additional load reveals limits and breaklines that were never known before - your temporary integer IDs are suddenly too small, you reach the maximum file descriptors in a Linux distro, your hash function suddenly has repeating conflicts, your DB index is suddenly oversaturated.

Having massive exponential growth of your traffic would probably require constant refactoring to meet the ever changing system limits.

show 1 reply
browningstreettoday at 5:36 PM

> They likely also have the money for hardware resources.

Amazing you can say this with a straight face in these DC building times.

Have you tried getting Azure east instances anytime lately?

show 1 reply
pan69yesterday at 7:32 PM

> I would take what C-level execs say with a grain of salt.

100% agree.

> Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience.

Not my overall experience 30 years in the industry.

> They likely also have the money for hardware resources.

You'll always be asked to do more with less, at least, that's my own experience.

show 1 reply
srmattotoday at 5:22 PM

Infra is a cost center for a business unless your a PaaS and even then maybe still. Cost centers are usually ferreted out for savings, not investment.

show 1 reply
nobodysaidsotoday at 5:36 PM

>They likely also have the money for hardware resources.

Hey man, in case you hadn't heard, the hardware industry is having a lot of trouble keeping up. "Expand our capacity" isn't as easy as it was 2 years ago.

fooeytoday at 6:55 PM

I think owning GitHub is a prestige play, not necessarily thought of as a profit center.

Now however, it's competing for resources directly with the corporations core strategic plans.

GitHub having issues is embarrassing, but the shareholders don't really care.

show 1 reply
27183today at 8:50 PM

My pet theory is they backed themselves into a corner with Actions. That was a step change in computational scaling effort. It also fell immediately on the heels of the Microsoft acquisition.

Something about these two factors seems to have conspired to wreak absolute havoc on their uptime in the ~7yr hence. The AI slopocalypse hasn't helped matters, but the foundations were laid far earlier.

Would love to hear from an insider, either for or against this conspiracy theory.