11–20 of 158 posts
If they're incurring serious costs to run, that tells me Signal's days are numbered until it has to start commercializing.
We rarely get to see an app have to grow suddenly like that. And with Signal being open source, it must be very educational to follow. Has anyone found a publication around what they had to do on the technical side (code)? Edit: Their server's repo hasn't been updated since April 2020. Why? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
1) a bahillion new signups, so they just needed to deploy a bajillion more instances of the server.
2) The clients basically DDoS'ing their servers.
If you look at the android client source, you can see all the commits they put in are about handling errors properly when the server(s) get overloaded.
Is it technically possible to have end to end encryption with Signal if it evolved to first attempt to use direct connections via RTC or some other method? If they're incurring serious costs to run, that tells me Signal's days are numbered until it has to start commercializing.
We rarely get to see an app have to grow suddenly like that. And with Signal being open source, it must be very educational to follow. Has anyone found a publication around what they had to do on the technical side (code)? Edit: Their server's repo hasn't been updated since April 2020. Why? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
The problem is 2 fold. 1) a bahillion new signups, so they just needed to deploy a bajillion more instances of the server. 2) The clients basically DDoS'ing their servers. If you look at the android client source, you can see all the commits they put in are about handling errors properly when the server(s) get overloaded.
As Signal is a non-profit what are the possible solutions to reduce costs going forward while maintaining availability?
How about a federated solution? I'd be happy to run my own conversations on my own server.
Is it technically possible to have end to end encryption with Signal if it evolved to first attempt to use direct connections via RTC or some other method? If they're incurring serious costs to run, that tells me Signal's days are numbered until it has to start commercializing.
Is it technically possible to have end to end encryption with Signal if it evolved to first attempt to use direct connections via RTC or some other method? If they're incurring serious costs to run, that tells me Signal's days are numbered until it has to start commercializing.
As Signal is a non-profit what are the possible solutions to reduce costs going forward while maintaining availability?
Move from the cloud to k8s hosted on their own metal. The Signal server is simplistic (a compliment), it’s the bandwidth that you’re going to get raked over the coals for at cloud providers. Burst to the cloud for outlier events.
Is it technically possible to have end to end encryption with Signal if it evolved to first attempt to use direct connections via RTC or some other method? If they're incurring serious costs to run, that tells me Signal's days are numbered until it has to start commercializing.
This came up on the forum and someone raised a good point - would direct connections require the sender and receiver to be online at the same time? I feel like the architecture has to be more clever than just a WebRTC connection between clients.
Could always use 'indirect' connections to store-and-forward, and only relying on the central server when absolutely necessary.
You do risk some lost messages when you underestimate failures, but the same thing applies to any central store-and-forward facility.
Early Kazaa depended on some nodes becoming supernodes. Supposedly initial Skype was decentralized like this (particular to get around NATs), until it became exclusively client-server.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Move from the cloud to k8s hosted on their own metal. The Signal server is simplistic (a compliment), it’s the bandwidth that you’re going to get raked over the coals for at cloud providers. Burst to the cloud for outlier events.
If I'm not mistaken, signal is specifically hosted on AWS to so that governments can't just blacklist their IPs without blacklisting all of AWS. So moving to bare metal isn't really an option.