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Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

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Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#241

Post by smcleod »

tristanj wrote: post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

GitHub's reliability has been going downhill longer than AI has been becoming popular. I feel like the load is becoming the scapegoat.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#242

Post by esperent »

sosodev wrote: post #180
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #134

Github used to be built on mysql / redis / ruby on rails / C / shell, running on dedicated hardware. Microsoft left it like that after they acquired the company. Eventually, though, they decided to migrate the whole thing to Azure. And they were far enough through that to be basically committed... when AI coding started hitting them with much higher workloads. I personally think the reliability problems are more to d…

They didn't leave the architecture alone, right? They shoved React in and created a weird SSR + React frankenstein that is objectively worse in many ways.

React apps with SSR is standard these days.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#243

Post by bcx »

tristanj wrote: post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

14X at github's scale is unlikely an easy problem to solve.

Additionally, there is a strategic reason to be the repository for all code, free, or not which is likely at conflict with reliability goals.

(e.g. they could get rid of their free tier which would improve reliability at the cost of allowing a new competitor to be the repository for all new AI driven code)

The long term strategic benefit of being the home to all code (or most of it) is enormous. They are likely balancing that strategic goal with what is seen as short-term internally as reliability.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#245

Post by farfatched »

altcognito wrote: post #239
martinald wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that? GitHub Actions is 'simpler' to scale, it's just a bunch of runners, and Azure has a lot of capacity for VMs (mostly). Git itself is a compute intensive process and is far more interlinked.

Not sure how you see git repos as a compute intensive process. A single git commit takes milliseconds. It's mostly a hash calculation and a small file transaction. They've added some database stuff around the edges, but that is pretty tame as well. Actions are unbounded, take minutes to resolve - sometimes hours and there are megabytes, gigabytes of network transactions. Scaling commits is a load balancer and some mo…

I'm sure GitHub Actions are more intensive, but that doesn't make it harder to scale, which is what martinald said.

> Scaling actions is VMs, networking, imbalances in load, memory, insuring that folks aren’t running VM training against your infrastructure.

That infra scaling is what the cloud provider can easily offer.

Meanwhile, GitHub repos/issues/PRs is all the business logic that they've written, evolved over time.

Many coupled distributed DBs, indexes, consistency concerns, etc.

That's trickier to scale.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#246

Post by sosodev »

esperent wrote: post #242
sosodev wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't leave the architecture alone, right? They shoved React in and created a weird SSR + React frankenstein that is objectively worse in many ways.

React apps with SSR is standard these days.

SSR that is javascript native, sure. This is still Ruby doing the rendering.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#248

Post by chermi »

Edit- does anyone know the breakdown of the load and load types that are actually bottlenecking GitHub? Is it just plain PRs? Is it the actions? Other stuff I never messed with?

Couldn't they charge just a teeny tiny amount per PR or diff size or something and this would basically go away? I don't actually know what is the heaviest load. Probably actions? I understand it would be nice if it was free, but they have to pay for their infrastructure.

Or maybe pay extra for priority. Does everyone pushing llm generated code they'll rewrite or abandon in a week need all of the GitHub processes executed instantly? I'm probably way out of my depth here on what the actual bottlenecks are.

Could they break out reliability promises and reserve capacity for just the basics?

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#249

Post by chermi »

27183 wrote: post #163
etc-hosts wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every response from GitHub must be deterministic. OpenAI and Anthropic do not have this problem.

OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Gemeni, etc also have another escape hatch: they can arbitrarily and potentially invisibly reduce your quality of service at their discretion. They can choose to route your request to an expensive model or a cheap one. By contrast, the best Github can do is slow your request down.

And they never even have to admit they do it.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#250

Post by lilerjee »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #48
tristanj wrote: post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

If that's the superficial cause, then the root cause is a lack of limits. Any production system in the world will go down from too much load if you don't limit the load. You have to do performance testing to determine what the system's peak utilization is, and put limits in place to prevent exceeding that limit. There are multiple kinds of limits you need. First you need the raw i/o limits on things like networking,…

Too complicated and the price is very huge.

Fixing small errors and keeping going on maybe is a good business strategy.

The last result is probably what you said.

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