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>Similarly, I’m not sure why there are these weird spikes every three minutes (+- ~1minute) sometimes. Could these just be keep-alive requests? For example, the mobile app checks whether it's still connected?
I didn't think of that.
3 minutes does seem like the kind of time an engineer would code into their app.
So does that mean that the spiky periods are times when people are online the whole time?
inb4 facebook resolves this issue by banning anyone who's connected 24/7. (that wouldn't solve the problem either way, btw -- a small group of people could conspire to pull this data at irregular intervals and then share the data with one-another to get a more complete picture while still staying reasonably undetectable if done right.)
What determines whether the app is online? What happens when the user is using the phone but FB is in the background? Does FB get some kind of update when the user is active on device? Or do OP's friend live in the FB app all day long?
Hi, I wrote this blog post. I have no idea what the Facebook apps (Messenger and the Facebook app) do in the background. It's easy to test that, but I didn't because #yoloswag
>Similarly, I’m not sure why there are these weird spikes every three minutes (+- ~1minute) sometimes. Could these just be keep-alive requests? For example, the mobile app checks whether it's still connected?
Good point! I didn't think of that. 3 minutes does seem like the kind of time an engineer would code into their app. So does that mean that the spiky periods are times when people are online the whole time?
I'd be inclined to think so, but I don't work for Facebook, there may be an entirely different reason :)
Edit: or maybe, maaaybe, it's the point of time when people fall asleep over their mobile - they've stopped interacting with the app, it still sends a few keep-alive requests, and then logs itself out.
Some people might take issue with it, but the writing for this had me in stitches. I very much agree with the author on graphing libraries - there are a few good simple ones, but as soon as you want anything unusual you have to jump to these big, hard to configure monstrosities. More than once I've just given up and written my own server-side generator.
Personally, I have chat off all the time on FB, and I don't have the Messenger (or FB) app on my phone either, so I guess I'm always sleeping :)
On a side note,
> If you’re wondering why the response starts with “for (;;);”, it’s to, among other things, encourage developers to use a quality JSON decoder, instead of like, y’know, eval().
This is wrong, as I commented on the linked StackOverflow post, perhaps a bit too strongly. But it's really frustrating to see that people have misconceptions because of incorrect answers on StackOverflow.
Some people might take issue with it, but the writing for this had me in stitches. I very much agree with the author on graphing libraries - there are a few good simple ones, but as soon as you want anything unusual you have to jump to these big, hard to configure monstrosities. More than once I've just given up and written my own server-side generator.
By sticking to jokes and a simple style, I never felt confused or lost in lingo.