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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

sfba.social

471–480 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#471
post #272

This bug is very unlikely to be the reason. The rate limiter on the server side is cheap and the frontend bug only gets triggered with the rate limit active. I have seen similar bugs in the systems I oversee because network libraries love to retry requests without sane limitations by default. But I never saw them make our rate limiters sweat. It's slightly more annoying when they hit an API which actually does some e…

Depends on the scale of the overall system. I have personally seen and attempted to mitigate degenerate cases where these retries overwhelmed the backend so much that the servers were falling behind in simply rejecting the requests.

Infact it got so bad because of all those retries at multiple levels from upstream callers that requests were essentially timing out at the TCP buffer/queue before they could be processed by the application.

Don’t know if the Twitter homepage backend is at similar scale.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#472

Don't interrupt your opponent when they are making a mistake.

Why do people oppose Twitter? It's a social network, you can choose not to use it.

Personally, not just twitter, all social media I’m happy to see it dies, and no, “stop using it” mindset isn’t an argument when it severely affects the majority of the people around you, and start not just influencing the populace opinions but shaping the next generation. Who ever controls that narrative in the media get to decide what’s the next laws to be considered, after all, that’s how democracy works.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#474
post #269

Seems like it might not even be a bug. Elon says they limited it to 600 viewed tweets per day which is an insane limit. Most people would go through that in 5 minutes of scrolling

Might be time to reflect on how much useless information we consume

So many things are useless, but still entertaining in one way or another.

And then Twitter is used for "relevant" information as well, from emergency or transport authorities using it for quick information instead of having their own system to news of any kind or discussions and information exchange in different peer groups.

Considering that they count all tweets being loaded towards the quota (for instance replies to a tweet, if you open the detail page) and they like to shove tweets from Musk and others in the timelines the quota can be reached quite quickly even on considerate use.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly it. Musk a week ago was telling us that there were a record number of user seconds on the site. Now he’s telling us they’re all content-scrapers. The very concept of truth is eroded.

That's what makes it so perfect when he echos conspiracy theories, Russian talking points, and other whacky talking points and elevates untrustworthy sources by tweeting things like "interesting" catapulting them into everyone's feed.

[flagged]

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leas…

Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels. The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everyth…

This narrative just about washed when Musk hadn’t had time to get his feet under the table, and all we could speak about is “Elon could!”

The data is in now!

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#479
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter operates its own datacenters.

And yet they also host with AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle. Cloud people take note: this is what lock-in looks like, and it's coming to a place near you.

Cloud agnostic is hard

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#480

> If you missed the initial news of the impending showdown, Platformer reported on June 10th that Twitter had been refusing to pay Google for its cloud services ahead of their contract’s June 30th renewal date. > Twitter’s Google Cloud contract dates back to 2018. https://www.engadget.com/twitter-has-supposedly-started-payi... Oh... this explains all this fiasco :facepalm:

As the article says, and as Bloomberg, etc have also reported. Twitter finally agreed to play nice with Google and the issue was resolved. They are probably trying to get off of GCP, but this isn't because they suddenly lost access to GCP from payment refusal.

Well, I'm sure that migration off of GCP will go smoothly with no problems. Won't cause any more stability issues with Twitter. /s
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