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Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

micahlerner.com

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Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#21

Post by Arainach »

velcrovan wrote: post #10

Seems like whenever I log into FB lately it's pretty much always in a state of “graceful feature degradation”. For example, as soon as I log in I see a bell icon in the upper right with a bright red circle containing an exact positive integer number of notifications. It practically screams “click here, you have urgent business”. I can then leave the web page sitting there for any number of minutes, and no matter how…

The initial render of Facebook's UI slows dramatically (I suspect but cannot prove intentionally) if you have adblockers/uBlock Origin/etc.

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#24

Post by golergka »

ndriscoll wrote: post #15
Banditoz wrote: post #2

Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?!

Facebook makes over 300 requests for me just loading the main logged in page while showing me exactly 1 timeline item. Hovering my mouse over that item makes another 100 requests or so. Scrolling down loads another item at the cost of over 100 requests again. It's impressive in a perverse way just how inefficient they can be while managing to make it still work, and somewhat disturbing that their ads bring in enough…

Wasn't the whole point of GraphQL in mitigating this?

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#25

Post by baby »

bee_rider wrote: post #18
bagels wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't comment on the numbers, but think of how many engineers work there and how many users Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram have. Each engineer is adding new features and queries every day. You're going to get a lot of queries.

We’ve really wasted an incredible amount of talent-hours over last couple decades. Imagine if we’d worked on, like, climate change or something instead of ad platforms.

You make it sound like everybody at Meta works in the ads department.

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#26

Post by meowface »

philippta wrote: post #13
velcrovan wrote: post #10

Seems like whenever I log into FB lately it's pretty much always in a state of “graceful feature degradation”. For example, as soon as I log in I see a bell icon in the upper right with a bright red circle containing an exact positive integer number of notifications. It practically screams “click here, you have urgent business”. I can then leave the web page sitting there for any number of minutes, and no matter how…

Without being able to verify, I would assume it’s designed to behave in this way. The longer you wait the more anticipation builds up, the more gratifying it becomes.

I think there's no chance they intentionally want users to wait 20 seconds to see their latest notifications.

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#28

Post by danpalmer »

Joining Google a few years ago, one thing I was impressed with is the amount of effort that goes into graceful degradation. For user facing services it gets quite granular, and is deeply integrated into the stack – from application layer to networking.

Previously I worked on a big web app at a growing startup, and it's probably the sort of thing I'd start adding in small ways from the early days. Being able to turn off unnecessary writes, turn down the rate of more expensive computation, turn down rates of traffic amplification, these would all have been useful levers in some of our outages.

Re: Defcon: Preventing overload with graceful feature degradation (2023)

#29

Post by Scubabear68 »

baby wrote: post #25
bee_rider wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve really wasted an incredible amount of talent-hours over last couple decades. Imagine if we’d worked on, like, climate change or something instead of ad platforms.

You make it sound like everybody at Meta works in the ads department.

They all do.
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