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An update on GitHub availability

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Re: An update on GitHub availability

#241

Post by ifwinterco »

rmunn wrote: post #193
sbarre wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see them expiring/archiving/deleting inactive projects after some time. I feel like this would have negative impacts (lots of interesting historical archives on Github) but maybe if a project hasn't been touched, or cloned, in some time, it just gets deleted with some notice.

Thing is, projects that don't get touched for months and months are the least costly. Disk space is cheap; what's costly is compute time to process new commits, new/updated/closed issues, new/reviewed/merged PRs, and so on. Inactive projects just sit there taking up disk space but basically zero compute time. So it would make no sense at all for them to delete old, inactive projects. (Which doesn't mean they won't do…

Also creates a perverse incentive to automatically push random commits to make sure your repos stay “active” and don’t get deleted, creating more load

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#242

Post by bartread »

> I wanted to give an update on GitHub’s availability in light of two recent incidents.

[Emphasis mine]

Vlad, you are living in a very different world to me.

GitHub has suffered dozens and dozens of outages since the beginning of the year. It is notably less available and reliable than it was even as recently as last year. People have created dashboards and heatmaps showing how bad GitHub has become. At least one of those has made it to the front page of Hacker News. In fact its unreliability and persistent availability issues have become a frequent topic of conversation across sites and communities frequented its users - of which HN and Reddit are two obvious examples. At this point GitHub's unreliability risks becoming a meme, if it hasn't already done so.

The only thing your post makes clear is that your priorities ARE NOT clear.

> Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features.

WRONG!

Your priorities are:

1. Availability 2. Availability 3. Availability

You have NO OTHER PRIORITIES.

If you want other priorities, focus on AVAILABILITY for 6 months and then come back and we can all have a serious conversation about something else.

In the meantime, you need to understand that GitHub's reliability over months and months - not just in April - has been completely unacceptable.

Focus on fixing that and on nothing else.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#244

Post by dminik »

bartread wrote: post #242

> I wanted to give an update on GitHub’s availability in light of two recent incidents . [Emphasis mine] Vlad, you are living in a very different world to me. GitHub has suffered dozens and dozens of outages since the beginning of the year. It is notably less available and reliable than it was even as recently as last year. People have created dashboards and heatmaps showing how bad GitHub has become. At least one of…

I've recently built a script that periodically (every 25 minutes) fetches the latest merged PRs to check for some potential rule violations. I'm not an admin and couldn't get the events API working, so I just resorted to polling.

On an average ~8 hour working day, there's at least one failed request. In fact, looking over the logs, I can't spot a single day that did not have a failed request.

Now, I can't guarantee that these are all caused by GitHub (as opposed to my connection), but it is pretty funny.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#245

Post by dude250711 »

bartread wrote: post #242

> I wanted to give an update on GitHub’s availability in light of two recent incidents . [Emphasis mine] Vlad, you are living in a very different world to me. GitHub has suffered dozens and dozens of outages since the beginning of the year. It is notably less available and reliable than it was even as recently as last year. People have created dashboards and heatmaps showing how bad GitHub has become. At least one of…

Microsoft board and shareholders: "LOL, nah! More vibe coding inside and outside plz".

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#247

Post by dude250711 »

s_ting765 wrote: post #41

> Vladimir Fedorov is GitHub's Chief Technology Officer .... He currently serves on the board of Codepath.org, an organization dedicated to reprogramming higher education to create the first AI-native generation of engineers, CTOs, and founders. I think I found the issue.

Sounds like a bet that AGI is not achievable.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#248

Post by chillfox »

estimator7292 wrote: post #207
voncheese wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that priorities aren't exclusive and there may be teams/individuals that aren't able to contribute if they stay in their current teams/roles Where it becomes questionable though is when enough progress isn't being made on the top priority (reliability). If Github is being true to their word, they need to be pulling people off of teams that are working on features to work on reliability so that top priority gets…

Sure, but frontend devs fundamentally cannot contribute to the structural reliability issues. The person who rewrote the issue page view probably doesn't know anything about multi-cloud scaling for millions of users with Azure-crippling throughput. That's an incredibly specialized set of knowledge and experience that is utterly disjunct to frontend work. But at the same time, given the state that GitHub is in, I pers…

I disagree with that, There’s likely quite a bit frontend devs can do to improve things. Stuff like optimising the requests to reduce the load being put on the backend.

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#249

Post by [deleted] »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #164
maccard wrote: post #13

It's kind of hard to read this with a straight face. The unlabelled graph with big numbers on top, the priorities that don't match with what we're experiencing, and a list of things that they're doing without a real acknowledgement of the _dire_ uptime over the last 12 months....

You mean since GH acquisition 6 years ago https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

[deleted]

Re: An update on GitHub availability

#250

Post by code2die »

rwmj wrote: post #132
embedding-shape wrote: post #31

Hah, love that now they say "Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features" when 6 months ago, it was seemingly exactly the same except Azure supposedly was gonna save them: > GitHub Will Prioritize Migrating to Azure Over Feature Development - GitHub is working on migrating all of its infrastructure to Azure, even though this means it'll have to delay some feature development. > In a…

It's entirely possible the move to Azure has made the availability problems worse. Dedicated hardware is much more predictable than cloud. "Let's not move to Azure and instead buy a few more racks" was likely a decision beyond the pay grade of github's management.

Moving to cloud makes scaling much easier and faster than colo data centers, though it cost more and might not be as reliable.
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