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Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

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Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#201

Post by rcxdude »

SBArbeit wrote: post #192

Ex-Microsoft, ex-GitHub, laid off nine months ago, not going to violate any agreements, but I will give some context. A lot of this applies to any large engineering org, really. Hilarious that this entire thread is people speculating on things they have no idea about. If it sounds like I'm defending GitHub a bit, yeah, I am. I can't think of a comparable situation that any other web site has been through. This isn't…

>Spare me the "Azure sucks" comments. Please. Microsoft Azure is the second-largest computing system on the planet

The fact that Azure is big and important has very little to do with the quality of the implementation (and my experience with the services on top of it suggests that quality is not great).

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#202

Post by winrid »

tristanj wrote: post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

That doesn't answer the question at all. I suspect most components are already horizontally scalable, if not, which ones? That would be an interesting discussion for HN.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#205

Post by DANmode »

pixelesque wrote: post #55
dumberquestions wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting increasing demand for tokens at an accelerating pace.

Is that the same as storing state in a DB and on a filesystem though? Like, I get there are other features they have, and things like history, but I don't think it's quite the same. Isn't most (not all) of the LLM's resources stateless compute to a large degree? (Not defending MS at all though, I currently can't create a PR on the required branch for my work (won't load the branch list) and their availability is real…

> Is that the same as storing state in a DB and on a filesystem though?

Google “RLHF”.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#206

Post by altcognito »

SBArbeit wrote: post #192

Ex-Microsoft, ex-GitHub, laid off nine months ago, not going to violate any agreements, but I will give some context. A lot of this applies to any large engineering org, really. Hilarious that this entire thread is people speculating on things they have no idea about. If it sounds like I'm defending GitHub a bit, yeah, I am. I can't think of a comparable situation that any other web site has been through. This isn't…

14x is a lot commits, but I seriously have doubts that some pushes are putting them over the edge. (as many have suggested)

> GitHub Actions

For me this is probably this biggest culprit along with the general pressure of AI against the hardware. Github actions became really popular. So many of those 14x commits are generating real CPU and network load.

This is a really non trivial problem. They can't just wall it off. They have real customers on that stuff.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#208

Post by itemize123 »

cwnyth wrote: post #16
joshdavham wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft acquiring GitHub is not a valid root cause analysis explaining Github’s degraded SLA.

According to that graph, performance drops widely after Microsoft's acquisition before AI enters the scene. If not Microsoft, how else do you explain it, or is the graph somehow misleading?

it's just inaccurate data prior to microsft acq

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#209

Post by springtimesun »

cbeach wrote: post #160
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #134

Github used to be built on mysql / redis / ruby on rails / C / shell, running on dedicated hardware. Microsoft left it like that after they acquired the company. Eventually, though, they decided to migrate the whole thing to Azure. And they were far enough through that to be basically committed... when AI coding started hitting them with much higher workloads. I personally think the reliability problems are more to d…

After their infamous "Fail Whale" outages, Twitter replaced its Ruby on Rails / MySQL stack with modern (at the time) technologies: Scala (functional language running on the JVM) / Finagle (RPC) / Thrift (framework) / Kafka (message queues) and this made Twitter stable under the load of several hundred million users. Ruby is single-threaded, slow with poor GC and memory leaks. As Twitter's Alex Payne said publicly in…

Current Rails and Co are miles away from where they used to be then, but even then my feeling was that maybe it was the skill/culture/dev ops at Twitter that was at least partly responsible for the fail whale. But I don’t have any insight as to what was actually going on inside before and after that transition.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#210

Post by tibbar »

conartist6 wrote: post #161
tibbar wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that it's probably a skill issue. Scaling a mature platform 10x can be a really, really hard problem, they obviously don't have their arms around a solution, and are probably spending a majority of their time on ops to keep the bleeding down. In the old days you would have Jeff Dean come down from heaven and invent a new database for you or something like that. It doesn't really seem like Github has th…

May I just leave this for you here? https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... A technical foundation is not infinitely strong. Put a big enough castle on a swamp, and it will sink into the swamp.

This is nightmarish.
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