Funny thing is that the repo is only 7 MB gzipped (or 4 with lzma). Not that surprising, since it's just metadata of course. They say they have about 1 million fetches/clones per week, so that would make about 16 TB per month. I'm not sure how much bandwidth costs, but wouldn't some sympathetic CDN host that for free, since they're OSS?
CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
251–260 of 320 posts
Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
#252It's difficult to run an open source project on a budget of $0. You're always relying on the goodwill of others.
Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> GitHub providing open source projects > the option to buy reserved capacity. I have no affiliation with GitHub, but I'd guess that if you were paying for one of their $200/month organization plans[1] you'd be having a very different conversation with them about rate limiting. 1. https://github.com/pricing
I would be interested if any of the top five open source projects consuming the most resources are paying Github anything.
How much cash do the top five open source projects bring in? That's the other side of it. Funding a side project, let alone a large open source project, is hard
Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally disagree. The CocoaPods usage model is not at all the expected way to use GitHub. I'm surprised using GitHub that way is even allowed by the TOS. It's very obviously a hack to avoid paying for their own infrastructure. The project representative in the issues thread even admits as much in his response. Just about every other package manager for every other language (Pip, CPAN, Hackage, etc.) uses its own in…
Homebrew uses Github in roughly the same way.
In this case the difference between 'abuse' and fair use may be a homebrew dev that works for github. I would expect that to be a perk of most places that I work.
I've run tor exit nodes and repo hosting when I worked for ISPs and Datacenters while at the same time shuting customers down who do the same. The difference being that I had that conversation with my boss and said, 'this will violate our normal terms of service but I would like to do this.' The boss is of course more willing to make that concession when he can walk down the hall and say, 'uh, we have extremely high usage and today, can you shut down the repos until we can get another link installed?'
Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
#255It's totally reasonable to host your code on github and to build a package manager that loads the content of a package from it's github repo. What seems insane is to use a single github repo as the universal directory of packages and their versions driving your package manager. There's a reason rubygems has their own servers and web services to support this use case for the central library registry, even if the sourc…
I wonder whether you could use a DHT for the package directory.
Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
#256The criticism against CocoaPods here seems awfully harsh. Think about it from their perspective. GitHub advertises a free service, and encourages using it. Partly it's free because it's a loss leader for their paid offerings, and partly it's free because free usage is effectively advertising GitHub. CocoaPods builds builds their project on this free service, and everything is fine for years. Then one day things start…
I have never seen anywhere that GitHub advertises using them as a CDN. GitHub is for source control. That means a limited number of people pulling and submitting changes. That does not mean the general public using it as a CDN. In fact I seem to remember seeing somewhere active discouragement of using it as a CDN.
They advertise their CDN for user/organization pages. I've always been a little bothered that they have you use got for that.
Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
#257Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know, it sounded to me like he just didn't totally understand what Github was saying. By the end of the thread, it seemed like everyone was agreeing. I wouldn't be comfortable using words like "selfish" to describe any of what I read. I certainly don't think the barb about your willingness to employ people who write things on Github issues threads that you disagree with is helping anyone understand any part o…
> I certainly don't think the barb about your willingness to employ people who write things on Github issues threads that you disagree with is helping anyone understand any part of this situation. It seems to be one of HN's go-to insults. "Look at this person's behavior, I would never hire them," as if everyone wants to work at your startup.
> as if everyone wants to work at your startup.
Do you really think that when people say "I would never hire that person" that there is an implication of "everyone wants to be hired by me (and by extension my company)?"
Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the developers causing the issue, it's the end users.
In this case, developers are the end user population.
"This repository experiences a huge volume of fetches (multiple fetches per second on average). We understand that part of the CocoaPods workflow is that its end users (i.e., not just the people contributing to CocoaPods/Specs) fetch regularly from GitHub"
Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems particularly galling that their response to GitHub was to essentially throw their hands up and say "We don't want to change anything, fix it for us". I think GitHub had a near perfect response to this, they analyzed the problem, came up with a set of changes that could be made to help fix it (both short and long term), and pointed to steps they've taken to help out. CocoaPods on the other hand (or at least o…
I think that's pretty unfair. It's really obvious that the initial reply didn't really understand what was going on, and what was being explained. A couple followup additional explanations later, the same dev grokked the problem, CocoaPods' responsibility for the problem, and outlined a list of how they're going to solve it. Seemed to me to be a pretty nice example of professional and helpful candor between GH and an…
> It's really obvious that the initial reply didn't really understand what was going on, and what was being explained.
If you are in such a position, then it seems like the best course action would be to ask questions rather than list off reasons that you don't want to deal with it.