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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#741

Post by williamsmj »

andreygrehov wrote: post #729

> Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in Well, for one, this sounds just like yet another Elon-hater's comment. In _most_ cases, Elon's businesses are fairly successful, so a sarcastic "Elon's latest genius innovation" doesn't belong here. For se…

> why is he being attacked for a bad deployment?

Because it's quite literally one of the things he's responsible for at Twitter, by his own choice and description of his role (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1656748197308674048).

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#742

Post by Consultant32452 »

choppaface wrote: post #213
Topfi wrote: post #126

Speaking 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…

Well "forced to execute" is somewhat subjective. If you are convinced leadership is doing the "wrong thing," then best to either leave or accept that you're just collecting your paycheck. In the case of Twitter, the new owner has thoroughly broken the advertising business and is trying to aggressively pursue a new version of the data business Twitter once had-- E.g. Google's Caffeine, which Twitter also eventually lo…

I don't understand why anyone, at any job that is not C-level, has an attitude of anything other than collecting your paycheck. I care about my professional reputation and my career, but I don't care at all about the well-being of the company that has hired me to perform some task. I will advise to the best of my ability, but if they blow themselves up, why should I lose any sleep? That's their problem, not mine.

Detaching myself emotionally from my employer was one of the best things I've ever done for my mental health. When I was young I got upset when "the company" made bad decisions. Now I feel no negative emotion about it, sometimes I laugh at them.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#743

Post by andreygrehov »

williamsmj wrote: post #741
andreygrehov wrote: post #729

> Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in Well, for one, this sounds just like yet another Elon-hater's comment. In _most_ cases, Elon's businesses are fairly successful, so a sarcastic "Elon's latest genius innovation" doesn't belong here. For se…

> why is he being attacked for a bad deployment? Because it's quite literally one of the things he's responsible for at Twitter, by his own choice and description of his role ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1656748197308674048 ).

Should a CTO perform UAT?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#744

Post by TX81Z »

tmpz22 wrote: post #413

Can we please recognize that this is a holiday weekend and Elon rammed a big release forcing his engineers to come in and iterate multiple patches over the last 12 hours.

But at least they got to deploy directly to prod.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#746

Post by ineptech »

jayd16 wrote: post #726
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the thundering herd problem.

Explain why not, if you please. If unresponsiveness causes increased traffic, which causes further unresponsiveness, is that not referred to as a thundering herd problem? Is the stated mitigation of a backoff not fully relevant here?

It's the difference between one customer asking a hundred cooks for a waffle and a hundred customers asking one cook for a waffle. The former is the thundering herd (a bunch of processes trying to do something that only needs to be done once, causing resource contention) and this is akin to the latter (with the "customers" being parallel requests from the frontend).

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#747

Post by williamsmj »

andreygrehov wrote: post #743
williamsmj wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is he being attacked for a bad deployment? Because it's quite literally one of the things he's responsible for at Twitter, by his own choice and description of his role ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1656748197308674048 ).

Should a CTO perform UAT?

A CTO is responsible for failures in the technology org. A CTO who describes himself as responsible for "sysops" is specifically responsible for failures in SRE/ops. Leaders are responsible for work they didn't personally do. If they don't want to be responsible for their reports then they can always go back to being a junior IC.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#749

Post by ineedasername »

martincmartin wrote: post #373
Topfi wrote: post #126

Speaking 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 leas…

>The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left

Not necessarily. I’ve predicted bad outcomes for decisions in a few cases and been ignored but stuck around regardless. Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions.

Of course to remain productive and improve my influence in future decision making it is absolutely critical that when predictions come true, I do not go anywhere near an “I told you so mentality.”

Instead I do what I can to clean up the mess with a “how can I help?” attitude. And increasingly over time people take my opinions and analysis much much more seriously.

I wouldn’t say that’s the path everyone should take, especially because some work environments are just too toxic for any progress at all (I ran away, fast, from two jobs like that). And some people cherish having an entirely new type of challenge every few years instead of shepherding something through longer periods of time. All valid paths.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#750

Post by shreyshnaccount »

poisonarena wrote: post #704
lolinder wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 80% of Twitter was laid off or quit. I think it's a reasonable supposition that a good number of those were critical personnel who felt they could get a better deal somewhere else.

[flagged]

Well that's the easy part, and probably like half a percent of the work that goes on at a scale like that
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