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GitHub Major Service Outage

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: GitHub Major Service Outage

#21

Post by i336_ »

epicide wrote: post #16
i336_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this behavior with a lot of services. I can only chalk it up to something like clock drift between the processing node and the database server. Irritatingly I can't remember which site it was but I posted something somewhere a couple days ago and immediately after hitting enter the site marked what I'd said as submitted "a few seconds from now". I never fail to be amused that the fuzzy time library being…

I don't think it's really an edge case. Probably one of the main uses, actually. Sure, if you use it to show comment age, you shouldn't ever see it, but I'm sure they fully support using it for countdowns, too. EDIT: it's the 4th example under relative time for Moment.js ( https://momentjs.com/ ).

I can totally agree about relative timestamping in both directions (past+future) - my argument is more about the UX of situations where you're canonically referring to a past event.

So as not to spam with my reply to a similar comment, I'll link it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452335

Re: GitHub Major Service Outage

#22

Post by imbriaco »

brian_herman wrote: post #7
runeks wrote: post #4

Good thinking on GitHub's part not using github.com/github/status to host the content of status.github.com. Amazon, take notice.

Were they doing this before amazon had that major outage?

Yes. They've been hosting it outside of their production infrastructure for several years.

Re: GitHub Major Service Outage

#26

Post by r3bl »

thejosh wrote: post #18

Looks like their cdn is having problems as well now, seeing timeouts when trying to download archives.

Was receiving random downtimes when I've tried opening a certain project and its wiki ~1 hour ago. Nothing big and a couple of refreshes fixed it, just minor annoyance.

Re: GitHub Major Service Outage

#28

Post by mhils »

runeks wrote: post #4

Good thinking on GitHub's part not using github.com/github/status to host the content of status.github.com. Amazon, take notice.

Nitpick: They would still fail for DNS issues with *.github.com, so a domain like githubstatus.com would be even more resilient.

Re: GitHub Major Service Outage

#29

Post by yeukhon »

i336_ wrote: post #11
tyingq wrote: post #8

Seeing an interesting thing where my github issue comments just posted are apparently posted a short time in the future. http://imgur.com/a/eQSc9 Doesn't seem to break anything, but it is a bit curious. May not be new though...I just happened to notice it today.

I've noticed this behavior with a lot of services. I can only chalk it up to something like clock drift between the processing node and the database server. Irritatingly I can't remember which site it was but I posted something somewhere a couple days ago and immediately after hitting enter the site marked what I'd said as submitted "a few seconds from now". I never fail to be amused that the fuzzy time library being…

Git timestamp can be set with different timezone so technically GitHub can analzye the timestamp (which they do) and compare with the actual clock of timezone. There's only a small problem though: the latency from the clock check server must be low otherwise we would be 1 second ahead by the time we get response and then another second or two after webpage render.

So from a UX we should simply discount time drift +-5 seconds simply says "blah blah just now" and anything larger might warrant as a warning to the author (Github can reject the commit and ask for confirmation). Although re-editing commit is a hassle for changing timestamp. It's more of a "please make sure you computer time is synced next time."

Re: GitHub Major Service Outage

#30

Post by apeace »

As others have said, Github's postmortems are always great.

But frankly, I'd rather they have better uptime. Every couple months is too much. I pay them. My work pays them.

If their CEO is serious about zero downtime, how about he offers his paying customers a credit for time they cannot access the service?

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