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How We Built r/Place

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Re: How We Built r/Place

#51

Post by Ajedi32 »

huangc10 wrote: post #4

Can someone link to the full resolution final image? Been trying to find it. Thanks!

Here you go: https://i.imgur.com/ajWiAYi.png.

And for those interested, here's some additional stats:

- The original announcement about /r/place: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/62mesr/place...

- Full timelapse of the canvas over the course all 72 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY

- Heatmap of all activity on the canvas over the full 72 hours: https://i.redd.it/20mghgkfwppy.png by /u/mustafaihssan

- Timelapse heatmap of activity on the canvas: https://i.imgur.com/a95XXDz.gifv by /u/jampekka

- Entropy map of the canvas over the full 72 hours: https://i.imgur.com/NnjFoHt.jpg by /u/howaboot (explanation: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/63kuy6/oc_...)

- Map of all white pixels that were never touched throughout the event: https://i.imgur.com/SEHaUSJ.png by /u/alternateme

- Most common color of each pixel over the last...

  - 72 hours**: https://i.imgur.com/C5jOtl1.png by /u/howaboot

  - 24 Hours: http://aperiodic.net/phil/tmp/place-mode-24h.png by /u/phil_g

  - 12 Hours: http://aperiodic.net/phil/tmp/place-mode-12h.png by /u/phil_g

  - 6 Hours: http://aperiodic.net/phil/tmp/place-mode-6h.png by /u/phil_g

  - 2 Hours: http://aperiodic.net/phil/tmp/place-mode-2h.png by /u/phil_g
- Average color of each pixel over the course of the experiment: https://i.imgur.com/IkPOwIh.png

- Atlas of the Final Image: https://draemm.li/various/place-atlas/ by /r/placeAtlas/ (source code: https://github.com/RolandR/place-atlas)

- Torrents of various canvas snapshots and image data: https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/6396u5/rplace_archiv...

- The post announcing the end of /r/place: https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/6382bb/place_has_end...

It took a while for members of the community to realize what was happening and start recording snapshots of the canvas, so there are a few time periods early on that got skipped

Re: How We Built r/Place

#54

Post by tummybug »

foota wrote: post #42
tyrust wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might have phrased this poorly. >We should support at least 100,000 simultaneous users. This line makes me think that this is what they expected the peak (or near peak) to be. >Users can place one tile every 5 minutes, so we must support an average update rate of 100,000 tiles per 5 minutes (333 updates/s). So assuming that they mean that 100k is the peak and that clients are limited to 1 update per 5 minutes, t…

Prepare for the average and hope for the best seems like a great way for things to fail.

I agree, but if you do fail it means you are doing something right. In most cases I think YAGNI suffices for how much engineering to do.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#55

Post by eatitraw »

> We used our websocket service to publish updates to all the clients.

I used /r/place from a few different browsers with a few different accounts, and they all seemed to have slightly different view of the same pixels. Was I the only one who experienced this problem?

When /r/place experiment was still going, I assumed that they grouped updates in some sort of batches, but now it seems like they intended all users to receive all updates more or less immediately.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#56

Post by ag_47 »

theklub wrote: post #49
ag_47 wrote: post #28

Now I'm curious, Are there any websites that do something similar to /r/place? (hackathon idea?) Also, reminds be of the million dollar front page [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

Actually this idea has been around for years, and sadly isn't new at all. I just checked and there is one that's been around since at least 2006, http://da-archive.com/index.php?showtopic=42405 I remember lueshi

Right, true. Collaborative drawing was basically the "hello world" of real-time platforms back in the day (Firebase, Parse etc). But I think most of those were ephemeral canvases.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#57

Post by tummybug »

avip wrote: post #26
vmasto wrote: post #6

> Users can place one tile every 5 minutes, so we must support an average update rate of 100,000 tiles per 5 minutes (333 updates/s). It only takes a couple of outliers to bring everything down. I'm not exactly well-versed in defining specs for large scale backend apps (not a back-end engineer) but it seems to me that preparing for the average would not be a wise decision? For example, designing with an average of a…

I can shed that 333 [something/s], for any uncomplicated something, is so little that a single-core 10YO laptop running a single-process non-blocking webserver (a-la node) could probably handle it, and likely x10 it.

Sure in a perfect scenario with a well behaving load test client. In production you often encounter scenarios which place unexpected load on your servers.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#58

Post by noir_lord »

freehunter wrote: post #44
rhizome wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't my experience.

I'm not the same guy you were just talking to but in my experience on mobile Safari, I get "something went wrong, visit the homepage" when I navigate around reddit far too often. What's funny is it actually tends to resolve itself if I wait a second or two, but yeah, reddit engineering and infrastructure is not well equipped to handle the amount of traffic they receive. It's gotten better, but it's still not what you…

The main website is OK as is i.reddit.com but their mobile client is hilariously bad in a "I can't believe they thought this was ready" way, it takes an age to load, it stalls out all the time, the tap targets are too small, it has the classic "oh you hit this when you meant that and then clicked that, lets spin the wheel on where you really end up" problem that slow mobile apps have.

I know they deal with insane scale yadayada but it's simply not ready.

That and the horrific dark pattern on the "We want you to have the best, massive red/orange button marked continue that takes you to the app store and the tiny weeny little "continue to mobile site" underneath".

I don't want your damn app, stop asking me.

If I was cynical I'd think they didn't care about the mobile site been awful as it drives people to the app.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#60

Post by tummybug »

rhizome wrote: post #34
andoon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pages take a long time to generate all day, but during peak hours they take a minimum of 4 seconds each (depends on what page you're loading, if it's got lots of comments, etc), and many times they simply timeout. The engineers at reddit have been unable thus far to fix it.

This isn't my experience.

I can't agree with you. The sheer fact that I know well what the reddit error page is refutes this. In fact it's one of the few sites I frequent that I know even have an error page.
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