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Github major service outage

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Re: Github major service outage

#51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it at all odd? Github offers a convenient platform for using git. People use it. If Github were to explode forever tomorrow, active projects would just take their locally cloned repositories, and put them online somewhere else and carry on committing (albeit sans github's awesome social tools). That's the real power git offers us. It's just a fact of reality that most projects centrally organize through a few…

Yes, there is nothing wrong with using Github, but with using only Github as your git remote. Git (in theory) makes it easy to use multiple servers. Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers plus higher availability if Github goes down; just use your other remotes. Is there a git tool to share your remotes in a repository? One could use a distributed issue t…

"Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers ..."

It's crazy how GitHub's entire product is so easily marginalized by comments like this. I don't know if you meant to do it, but I think it is a serious problem with hacker culture. It's the kind of thinking that tricks startups into "knowing" they can do a better job than established competitors in spaces they know close to nothing about, because they "know" they can execute better. I speak from personal experience here.

I can guarantee that no amount of "adding some scripts/utilities" will get near what GitHub's service offers.

Re: Github major service outage

#52
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since they're using MySQL, is there a technical reason (as opposed to historical/lack of time reason) they're not using Galera Cluster? I'm in the process of migrating an existing datastore to MariaDB+Galera, and so far it seems like everything I could hope for in a clustered RDBMS.

Last I investigated Galera it lacked support for query caching. Over 50% of our queries are cache hits, so it made it hard to justify using Galera over a normal master+slave setup. However I could see it being useful for setups where a single server can't handle the load (we average 300 queries/sec on a single server with lots of room to spare.)

They still disable the query cache, but MySQL's query cache generally isn't considered all that great a thing anyway, so few people care. You're better off making judicious use of Redis or memcached.

The biggest win for Galera is high-availability that actually works with minimal effort. (I've never experienced a high-availability solution not based on multi-master/all-nodes-hot principles that didn't cause more problems than it solved.)

They also claim some scalability wins at the front end, but I haven't really tested that, and am content with the performance not being terrible.

Re: Github major service outage

#53
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't fair at all. It's 99.770% for a single month, immediately following a major event. If you sampled yesterday (or tomorrow, assuming no further issues) it would be higher. If you just look at today, it's at the much lower at 95.871%. If you assume no availability issues for the last 12 months (not true, but the point remains) then it's 99.981%. During an actual outage, availability was at the unacceptable 0%…

Hey, are you seriously defending 3 9's of uptime? That's abysmal. Github, if they're honest about their 12 month uptime levels would be lucky to be a single 9 service. Their uptime is Terrible with a capital T. But you know what? Until there's something better everyone is going to keep using them, right? Great services with values that are hard to find become damn near irreplaceable even with terrible uptime. This is…

I agree with the rest of your comment, but... a single nine service? You think they have 36.5 full days of downtime yearly, 3 full days monthly, 16.8 hours weekly, or 2.4 hours downtime every day? That's certainly not the case.

Not to mention that often when they have issues it only affects a subset of customers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nines_(engineering)

Re: Github major service outage

#54
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't fair at all. It's 99.770% for a single month, immediately following a major event. If you sampled yesterday (or tomorrow, assuming no further issues) it would be higher. If you just look at today, it's at the much lower at 95.871%. If you assume no availability issues for the last 12 months (not true, but the point remains) then it's 99.981%. During an actual outage, availability was at the unacceptable 0%…

Hey, are you seriously defending 3 9's of uptime? That's abysmal. Github, if they're honest about their 12 month uptime levels would be lucky to be a single 9 service. Their uptime is Terrible with a capital T. But you know what? Until there's something better everyone is going to keep using them, right? Great services with values that are hard to find become damn near irreplaceable even with terrible uptime. This is…

Are you seriously incapable of distinguishing "hang on, you are getting numbers that look bad using statistical chicanery" from "Github = teh awesome"?

Pointing out that someone whose point I agree with is using bad math as evidence is not disagreeing with the point, it's asking that people who agree with me behave like honest, civilized, human beings---I don't care that you've already gone through the hassle of getting your pitchforks out of storage.

Speaking of which... your accusation that they are lying means that Github has had nearly 37 days of total outage this year---that they're down for two and a half hours a day, every day, for a year straight. And by honest, I assume you mean "they are lying", as opposed to "they are using a different definition of uptime than I would like." Naturally, you have some evidence for these claims, right?

Re: Github major service outage

#55
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with using Github, but with using only Github as your git remote. Git (in theory) makes it easy to use multiple servers. Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers plus higher availability if Github goes down; just use your other remotes. Is there a git tool to share your remotes in a repository? One could use a distributed issue t…

"Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers ..." It's crazy how GitHub's entire product is so easily marginalized by comments like this. I don't know if you meant to do it, but I think it is a serious problem with hacker culture. It's the kind of thinking that tricks startups into "knowing" they can do a better job than established competitors in spaces they…

Here's the relevant HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5807770

Re: Github major service outage

#56

I find it somewhat odd that, given git's emphasis on distributed version control, we see so many git users have centralized themselves quite heavily on GitHub. Whenever GitHub runs into problems like this, it reminds me of when a team's CVS or Subversion servers used to go down. It could be a pretty disruptive occurrence, if it wasn't resolved quickly. While git can theoretically handle this better, in practice the u…

What? git remote add my_other_server_that_is_not_github git://my.oth.er/server/that/is/not/github.git

The problem is mostly that people fail to actually do this.

Re: Github major service outage

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Github is not just about Git hosting, it's about all those awesome social tools. If you use Issues as the main bug tracker, for example, you've got a problem.

Please point me at your distributed issue tracker project. I'd love to contribute!

I've often wondered if we could store issues in a separate branch.

Re: Github major service outage

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? git remote add my_other_server_that_is_not_github git://my.oth.er/server/that/is/not/github.git

The problem is mostly that people fail to actually do this.

Until github goes down, and then they run `git remote add friend ssh://coworkers-workstation//path/to/repo` and push code to each other until github comes back up.

Re: Github major service outage

#59
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it at all odd? Github offers a convenient platform for using git. People use it. If Github were to explode forever tomorrow, active projects would just take their locally cloned repositories, and put them online somewhere else and carry on committing (albeit sans github's awesome social tools). That's the real power git offers us. It's just a fact of reality that most projects centrally organize through a few…

Yes, there is nothing wrong with using Github, but with using only Github as your git remote. Git (in theory) makes it easy to use multiple servers. Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers plus higher availability if Github goes down; just use your other remotes. Is there a git tool to share your remotes in a repository? One could use a distributed issue t…

IMO Github doesn't break often enough to make effort of adding `some scripts/utilities` worthwhile.

Re: Github major service outage

#60
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with using Github, but with using only Github as your git remote. Git (in theory) makes it easy to use multiple servers. Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers plus higher availability if Github goes down; just use your other remotes. Is there a git tool to share your remotes in a repository? One could use a distributed issue t…

"Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers ..." It's crazy how GitHub's entire product is so easily marginalized by comments like this. I don't know if you meant to do it, but I think it is a serious problem with hacker culture. It's the kind of thinking that tricks startups into "knowing" they can do a better job than established competitors in spaces they…

I'd disagree, on paper Github has a nice suite of services, arguably best-in-class for some of them, but that doesn't make them untouchable. Github is only the latest in a line of code-hosting services.

Just because you tried and failed, doesn't mean every try will fail.

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