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AMA with Barack Obama

reddit.com

101–110 of 263 posts

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#101

I've read, I don 't know, hundreds of AMAs through the years on reddit and, in each and every case, I hate the UI experience. I wish there was a way I could say "Only show me questions that have been answered by OP". Right now, doing a find for [S] is about as good as it gets. When you get large AMAs though, they get buried due to the sheer number of comments. Ugh.

Check out http://reddit.com/r/tabled. Only useful after the AMA is over, admittedly.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#102
post #86

It looks like the Obama AMA has really caused some serious fires in reddit's backend infrastructure. The site's been down for the last 10 minutes. I would've thought that they'd have brought in some additional computing power for such an event, should've been easy for them considering they have a cloud deployment. Maybe this gives them greater reason to hire more engineers. I found it impressive that they served bill…

I agree that this is more of a problem with elastic cloud services than reddit engineers. I am sure that they anticipated the load and did what they could, but the traffic is surely immense

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#104
post #99
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be more interested in seeing how a site using a service like Google App Engine responds. In theory their Cloud Storage should just keep on scaling and scaling, rather than forcing the admin to spin up more instances, set up database replication, etc, etc.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk will do the same thing.

AFAIK Reddit aren't using it. If anyone can clarify I'd love to hear more.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#105
post #97
post #86

It looks like the Obama AMA has really caused some serious fires in reddit's backend infrastructure. The site's been down for the last 10 minutes. I would've thought that they'd have brought in some additional computing power for such an event, should've been easy for them considering they have a cloud deployment. Maybe this gives them greater reason to hire more engineers. I found it impressive that they served bill…

I'd be more interested in seeing how a site using a service like Google App Engine responds. In theory their Cloud Storage should just keep on scaling and scaling, rather than forcing the admin to spin up more instances, set up database replication, etc, etc.

Well, to be fair maybe they didn't have enough notice to spin up additional instances and get replication completed beforehand but I highly doubt that considering how high profile this AMA is. The US President doesn't probably drop in on people / or websites :P

Yeah GAE might work better but they're a bit out of reach mostly due to the technologies that you are required to use. Any migration at that scale is a seriously massive matter.

I guess the funny thing is that you can't plan to grow that big. Usually it just happens suddenly (facebook/reddit style) and then you've got to make some tough architectural calls.

It's funny how folks are like "That's a problem I'd like to have..". I'm not sure they're very happy with this problem at this very moment.. sigh

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#106
Reddit Admins, When you get a chance to read this. Please write a blog post on the traffic story from today... I'm sure I'm not the only one who's interested to see statistics on "new users" and hits. I'd also be interested to see the long tail effect as well.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#107
post #86

It looks like the Obama AMA has really caused some serious fires in reddit's backend infrastructure. The site's been down for the last 10 minutes. I would've thought that they'd have brought in some additional computing power for such an event, should've been easy for them considering they have a cloud deployment. Maybe this gives them greater reason to hire more engineers. I found it impressive that they served bill…

Looks like part of their infrastructure is still up. website is down, but I can connect on my mobile using baconreader app

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#108
post #38
post #30

Can't wait for the top post to be another asinine "comment phrased as a question" about legalising marijuana! Joking aside, I predict disappointment. Reddit users will want hard-hitting answers, Obama will definitely not give them (already the internet freedom question has been fluffy-answered). In all honestly, no-one should expect anything else- the POTUS is not going to unveil new thoughts and strategies through R…

The President of United States is doing a Reddit AMA and all you can do is predict disappointment ? Really? Why bother? If you're wrong, your comment will seem too negative and cynical (which it is). If you're right, well, that'd be disappointing, right? Comments like yours make me want to rename this site Hater News.

Well, he is a politician, it's not like he's going to say anything he wouldn't say on T.V. just because it's an internet forum.

I still hope that something interesting will come out of it, but 99% of the people who do AMAs just answer the questions that they want to.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#109
One way to handle this kind of thing would be to setup a separate stack just for Obama. obama.reddit.com running on a separate web/db/etc. That way even if everyone else is slowed down he can keep going.

Of course it entirely depends on where the problem was, but this kind of thing tends to work in a lot of cases.

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