Have they tried batching API calls? /s
Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
371–380 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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That will be the case once H1-Bs are reformed and universal healthcare becomes real. Until then, this is an unrealistic and cruel position.
Whoever survived multiple internal knockout round of reviews would definitely have high value in job marketplace. Believe it or not many people like working in current twitter like arrangement rather than cushy no impact 9-5 jobs.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#373Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof. I can of…
The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Engineers noticed that the home feed request was slow. They didn't understand how it worked, had no tools to profile it, and were given an unrealistic deadline to fix it. So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at least one of them was fast.
I worked in the games industry for a while, and came to understand how they could spend so much money and so much time, and yet release a game where even basic functionality was broken. It's exactly this sort of extreme schedule pressure that, ironically, makes a huge morass where changing one thing breaks 10 other things, so progress grinds to a halt.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
That will be the case once H1-Bs are reformed and universal healthcare becomes real. Until then, this is an unrealistic and cruel position.
Fair point. I was only considering the perspective of US citizens. It does make me wonder how much the ratio of forced labor H1B situations has gone up at Twitter as US citizens all bail from the fire. I cannot imagine why anyone would work there if they had a choice at this point.
According to some recent articles from mainstream media:
There are about 550 full-time engineers at Twitter. [1]
There are about 625-670 H1-B holders working at Twitter.[2]
This isn't quite the full story since of course H1-B holders might be doing other jobs than engineering; many of those 550 engineers are not US-based; there are other visas for foreign workers in the USA than the H1-B; and Musk has reassigned some workers from his other companies to work at Twitter.
But it sure looks like the answer is: a lot!
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/11/04/twitt...
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#375Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#376I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the experienced engineers have been proven correct. The duct tape is all coming apart at the seams now. It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.
I have to disagree. If you honestly take the emotion and politics out of this and evaluate on merit alone, what do you think? Twitter wasn’t healthy before Musk bought it. It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money. Also, it wasn’t a thriving product. It was stagnant. Since Twitter was purchased, the amount of features they have…
The company was not thriving but the product itself was rock solid.
It’s hilarious to think it is at all acceptable to kill public access, and drastically limit authenticated access, because of a few scrapers. There is no way Twitter prior to Musk’s acquisition would have had to do so.
> What do you think?
I think you are not looking at the situation objectively.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when you're at Twitter scale, sprinkle some jitter too.
What do you mean?
Jitter is a little randomness in how long clients wait between retries. It ensures that you don't have a "thundering herd" all retrying at the same time. Imagine if your API used exponential backoff of [1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, ...] and a large group of requests gets a retryable error at t=0. They will all retry at exactly t=1, t=2, etc. If the group is large enough that repeated surge of requests can knock you offline.
There's nasty form of this where the site is offline for a bit and then all the clients rush their requests in when it comes back online. The client requests are all coordinated on the site recovery time and end up overloading the site with their coordinated retries.
Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#378Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#379It's not a self ddos if twitter isn't going down. You can see in the video twitter is properly handling the load and is returning HTTP 429 when the client is sending too many requests. Hitting the rate limiter or requesting a post is light weight. It's not like it's spamming login requests which require a lot of resources due to key stretching.
The theory here is that this JavaScript bug caused the huge increase in requests which is why Twitter introduced strict limits on how many tweets users could access. So the result wasn't an outage, it was a radical reduction in functionality. I think that still qualifies as a self-ddos.
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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
A union vote is the only way to save that platform. Either unionize or let the company die.
Unions are for the people, not the company
Those people often have a better idea how to run "their" company (and are more interested in keeping the company alive) than the latest celebrity CEO who's then replaced with the next one after six months.