alt Hacker News2 billion per day is 23,148 per second on average. Perhaps peak bursts are >100K per second. That's a seriously insane number to keep up with at GitHub's scale. I've worked on systems that write >100K things per second and when it has to be globally distributed and relatively consistent within seconds, that's a very tough challenge.
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MattDamonSpace • today at 3:34 PM
I’d call it impossible if they weren’t already (mostly) doing it
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I was very excited about this comment until I got to this part:
> That's a seriously insane number to keep up with at GitHub's scale.
What exactly is it about GitHub's workload that makes us feel like the specific 23k things happening in that slice of one second are tantamount to insanity? In my experience, much of GitHub activity is changing labels on issues and posting plaintext comments.
Technically speaking, this rate of things happening per second is well within the territory of what one large server can handle. I know it sounds wild to imply that we could run all of the GitHub public cloud off a single machine, but how crazy is it in reality when we start to consider the actual I/O bandwidth that is available in a leading edge server platform? All of VisaNet circa 2009 could run off a single mainframe. That's global. It is plausible they still operate this way.
Virtually 100% of the aspects of GitHub that would quickly saturate I/O on the transactional core can be offloaded to horizontal systems like blob storage and CDNs.