AMA with Barack Obama • Hacker News Board

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#131

Post by ashray » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 9:19 PM UTC

pippy wrote: post #119

ashray wrote: 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…

Stupid question: is the because reddits backend is in python? I often hear that PHP + varnish is only limited by the size of the pipe. Can this scale on cloud platforms?

No, it's probably due to the massive number of reads/writes pumping through their system. I'm pretty sure that their database isn't able to handle what's going on at the moment.

Also, if you were to use Varnish as a cache, that wouldn't help you much with write access because every time there is a write (a new post..) you'd have to invalidate the cache. In a high volume scenario such as this (tons of posts coming in..), the page is as good as dynamic, even if you DO cache it for a bit.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#132

Post by gfodor » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 9:20 PM UTC

Gotta admit, found this hilarious: "By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience - NOT BAD!"

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#133

Post by deno » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 9:20 PM UTC

Kilimanjaro wrote: post #70

Heavy load? Is there a site in the internets that can handle a billion connections? Because sooner or later we will get there. Shame on all of us!

Akamai handles that billion connections. “All” Reddit has to do is handle the database transactions. They’re also serving all signed in users directly, from a secondary cache, but this is the kind of traffic they already handle on regular basis anyway.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#134

Post by danso » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 9:21 PM UTC

hooande wrote: post #50

Does anyone know more about how reddit does booking for their iama? They have a schedule and consistently book notable people. Do they have a staff dedicated to it?

A couple colleagues from my company have done scheduled IAMA's...I believe our communications people reached out to the mods, who then put it on the sidebar schedule.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#135

Post by rburhum » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 9:23 PM UTC

No patent questions?!? Come on, this was the time to upvote that

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#136

Post by MiguelHudnandez » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 9:24 PM UTC

This just in: President Obama shuts down social news site "Reddit"

...by making one thread very, very popular.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#137

Post by waterlesscloud » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 9:24 PM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #128

ConstantineXVI wrote: post #32

No flying cars or moon bases; just average people off the street able to talk directly to the "leader of the free world" on level ground. Not the future we were expecting, but I'll take it.

While, cool, this is no different than town hall meetings we've had since the inception of the Republic.

It's potentially very different in that on Reddit questions are voted up, giving an indication of how many people attach value to it. In theory this would make ignoring difficult questions a lot harder. In practice, in this situation, he can breeze by them all and never return.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#138

Post by deno » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 9:24 PM UTC

ljd wrote: post #99

untog wrote: 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.

Beanstalk has nothing to do with the database, which is the point of contention. Spinning up more app servers only helps with serving signed in users.

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#139

Post by ljd » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 9:24 PM UTC

I'm looking at the sort rank of questions on reddit and they don't exactly feel right. I can't pin point it except to say that a question with 59 upvotes posted 58 minutes ago is ranking higher than a question with 620 upvotes posted 60 minutes ago.

Do reddit moderators step in during these situations to supervote questions?

Re: AMA with Barack Obama

#140

Post by pav3l » Wed, Aug 29, 2012, 9:25 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #132

Gotta admit, found this hilarious: "By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience - NOT BAD!"

Which further confirms that this whole AMA is a carefully crafted PR stunt.