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How We Built r/Place

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Re: How We Built r/Place

#62

Post by programbreeding »

eatitraw wrote: post #55

> 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…

I experienced this as well. I have a different account logged in on mobile than what is logged in on my desktop. I wouldn't say things were drastically different, but when there was a location with a ton of activity (like OSU or the American flag towards the end), I saw different views between them.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#63

Post by foota »

tyrust wrote: post #48
foota wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They prepared for the worst (peak 100k users). The "hope" that those 100k would be spread out was based on the statistical likelihood that these 100k wouldn't line up too much over a 5 minute period. I didn't follow /r/place that much, but I haven't read any complaints about latency or failures so it looks like they did just fine.

They say elsewhere that they were prepared for 100k updates all at once. Which is the worst.

Edit: you're an sre, you probably have more experience planning these things than I ever will. I just can't help but think about what would happen if some trolls realized they could synchronize their updates and bring down the service. (Although based on the infrastructure it doesn't seem possible to cause lasting damage.)

Re: How We Built r/Place

#64

Post by vertex-four »

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.

Nor mine - although search essentially never works on the first try, and sometimes the second and third tries.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#65

Post by rhizome »

tummybug wrote: post #60
rhizome wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it's regional.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#67

Post by Ajedi32 »

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

There were definitely a few that popped up after /r/place closed down. (pxls.space being the most popular) They were nowhere near as successful as /r/place though.

Re: How We Built r/Place

#69

Post by justintbassett »

aw3c2 wrote: post #68
calosa wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reddit data scientists dumped it here... https://data.world/justintbassett/place-events

> Oops! We can't find that page.

my fault :). I have to get a few things ready for a public release of more data
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