Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Every Nodejitsu app is down

status.jit.su

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 52 posts

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#41

Post by seldo »

roberthahn wrote: post #26
seldo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those perennial problems: if you're spending engineering time making your "we're down" screen look good, you're really optimizing for the wrong thing, but on the other hand, some downtime is unavoidable and you don't want to look unprofessional. An HTTP 500 would definitely be more appropriate in this case, but it seems a 400 is accurate -- it's down because it has somehow forgotten where the apps are…

I know I'm getting in the weeds here but no, 400 is not appropriate -- all 4xx errors indicate an issue with user input (with the possible exception of 418). 5xx errors indicate the problem is occurring on the server side.

Yeah, that's fair. There's some grey area though -- like, if you accidentally delete a file on your site, your server will return 400. How is the server supposed to know it's accidental? So it's accurate (the user has requested a file that doesn't exist) while at the same time being misleading -- the file should be there.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#42

Post by driverdan »

sparkle202 wrote: post #10

This is the kind of downtime that would never happen again: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rk8FQr-... The employee page is unavailable right now. But if you look through the bios, they have a bunch of young open source hackers, but virtually zero operations experience, and virtually zero ops culture, unless you count hanging out in an IRC channel sometimes.

Obvious troll is obvious. You don't have a clue what you're talking about. They run thousands of instances on an infrastructure they've built mostly themselves. They built the platform to be provider agnostic, meaning they can run it on EC2, Rackspace Cloud, or an internal rack.

If you actually look at the open source projects listed you'll see most of them are from Nodejitsu and are used internally.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#43

Post by seldo »

niggler wrote: post #23
seldo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is often the case, their Twitter stream is a backup for news: https://twitter.com/nodejitsu

So then what happens if twitter also fail-whales?

You go to http://status.twitter.com/, which is powered by Tumblr which, in one of my favourite bits of Internet insanity, uses Twitter for status announcements: https://twitter.com/tumblr (there is a status.tumblr.com but it's blank).

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#44

Post by sparkle202 »

driverdan wrote: post #42
sparkle202 wrote: post #10

This is the kind of downtime that would never happen again: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rk8FQr-... The employee page is unavailable right now. But if you look through the bios, they have a bunch of young open source hackers, but virtually zero operations experience, and virtually zero ops culture, unless you count hanging out in an IRC channel sometimes.

Obvious troll is obvious. You don't have a clue what you're talking about. They run thousands of instances on an infrastructure they've built mostly themselves. They built the platform to be provider agnostic, meaning they can run it on EC2, Rackspace Cloud, or an internal rack. If you actually look at the open source projects listed you'll see most of them are from Nodejitsu and are used internally.

Ops is not about building the platform, it's about running the service.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#45

Post by trevor-rollin »

driverdan wrote: post #42
sparkle202 wrote: post #10

This is the kind of downtime that would never happen again: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rk8FQr-... The employee page is unavailable right now. But if you look through the bios, they have a bunch of young open source hackers, but virtually zero operations experience, and virtually zero ops culture, unless you count hanging out in an IRC channel sometimes.

Obvious troll is obvious. You don't have a clue what you're talking about. They run thousands of instances on an infrastructure they've built mostly themselves. They built the platform to be provider agnostic, meaning they can run it on EC2, Rackspace Cloud, or an internal rack. If you actually look at the open source projects listed you'll see most of them are from Nodejitsu and are used internally.

But they don't even host their own database servers?

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#46

Post by roberthahn »

seldo wrote: post #41
roberthahn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I'm getting in the weeds here but no, 400 is not appropriate -- all 4xx errors indicate an issue with user input (with the possible exception of 418). 5xx errors indicate the problem is occurring on the server side.

Yeah, that's fair. There's some grey area though -- like, if you accidentally delete a file on your site, your server will return 400. How is the server supposed to know it's accidental? So it's accurate (the user has requested a file that doesn't exist) while at the same time being misleading -- the file should be there.

I don't see a grey area in that example. I do see a bug tho :) - the server should return 404 (File Not Found) or 410 (Gone). As you say, the server has no way to know whether the file was deleted by accident. A smart server should return 410 if possible. That signals to the user: "Your request was perfect, but the file you wanted is no longer here". If your server returns 404, what it really means is "Hey, your request is fine, I just can't find what you're asking for". A 400 is the "Bad Request" error code; you would typically return this in web API contexts. The message here is "Hey, your request wasn't fine. I don't know what to do with it"

If nodejitsu was returning any 4xx errors during its downtime, that's a bug that should be fixed. In this situation, they should have returned either a 500 or a 503, and I'd probably pick 503, and leave 500 to any web apps that suffered an internal error. This way you know that it's not your app but the platform it's running on.

As always, the best place to look up the details is in the spec: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 -- long, but quite readable.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#48

Post by 0stanislav »

yid wrote: post #34
julianduque wrote: post #17

We are working on a major outage from our database provider, so, please, keep calm :) Our platform will be up asap. Check http://twitter.com/nodejitsu for updates. Sorry for the inconveniences and thanks for your patience.

A friendly word of PR advice: I'm not a customer and not affected by your outage, but if I were, being told to keep calm would really irritate me, especially if I were fighting fires right now. If you want someone to calm down, telling them to calm down generally won't have the desired effect.

Seconded.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#49

Post by film42 »

sendob wrote: post #37
film42 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two cents: CouchDB is great in that it allows you to remove the backend and rely solely on a database with REST baked in. However, it has its drawbacks, like database queries can be costly do to transactions over http. It's like every other argument in the community, how much control over ease do you want?

So you think these drawbacks are in someway related to the fact that they are offline? It seems like you are just jumping for a chance to kick a project and or spread some FUD. Not to mention "database queries can be costly do to transaction over http" => Not gonna get into this too much, but couchdb has an optimistic concurrency model, yeah? An implementation that uses a technology ( or like iriscouch is a db as a s…

You are a bit, but that's ok, fwiw, I'm speaking from my experience whether it's right or wrong, which I felt had value. I only meant that after using it on several projects, I felt that it had some cool features, but there are quite a few 'gotchas' that come with it. That is, come with thinking it's like any other database, which it's not.

Re: Every Nodejitsu app is down

#50

Post by weixiyen »

readme wrote: post #16
weixiyen wrote: post #11

Error handling in Node sucks. I hope they can find what is causing this.

This problem has nothing to do with node. It is a problem with a hosting service for node. JavaScript has exceptions. It has booleans. It has integers. What more do you need to handle an error?

hosting service presumably built on node... it's a PITA tracking down errors in production in node moreso than any other popular language ever
Post reply on HN