CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs • Hacker News Board

Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs

#281

Post by bobwaycott » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 6:35 AM UTC

mynameisvlad wrote: post #138

bobwaycott wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know, maybe I'm being overly pessimistic here, but to me it just screams of backpedaling once they saw the reaction they were receiving in this thread. The position shifted from "it's the way we architected things, how can you fix this for us" to "okay, here's some things we can do" pretty quickly and dramatically when the HN thread went up and people were reacting to the response. Cocoapods is using Github r…

I get where you're coming from. I also had a similar initial reaction. However, as I read through the subsequent discussion, it began to read as though the commenter was really not grokking the problem—and, more importantly, what to do to fix it. I thought it was very impressive that none of the GH participants reacted like some of the HN commenters here. Instead, they showed a great deal of patience and restraint in fully explaining the technical details, offering actionable solutions, and keeping everything very civil and supportive. Then the same guy who sounded like he was possibly being a jerk came back and sounded totally different because he seemed to actually know what to do to fix his project. Maybe the CP commenter read this HN thread and reacted to it, but I'll admit HN is the last place I'd think of finding one of my GH issues discussed.

Perhaps I'm just being too charitable. Either way, the project rather rapidly seemed to come to the right conclusion and jump on board fixing their problem.

On a related note, I feel like this issue could be turned into a great teachable moment for OSS projects; one agH could use as a tech blog and guides for how to be a good citizen and avoid things that can make your project get rate-limited without you knowing.

Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs

#282

Post by manyxcxi » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 6:37 AM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #263

manyxcxi wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was astonished at how selfish/myopic/whatever alloy's response was. To be blunt, you're abusing the shit out of SOMEONE ELSE'S product that you're not even paying for. Your first question shouldn't be to see what Github can do for you to make it so you don't have to make changes. You should be falling over yourself investigating all available avenues for reducing load. It's an incredibly entitled way to think about…

> To be blunt, you're abusing the shit out of SOMEONE ELSE’S > product that you're not even paying for. I AFAIC, that makes every free user a customer. They may not be a paying customer, but it's GitHub’s choice to be in the free hosting business.

That's true that anyone with a repo is essentially a customer, paying or not. But CocoaPods is really a bad actor in this in that they're not just hosting source code up their for development purposes. They're using it like a CDN, and bless Github for not find a reason to boot them, but I'm sure they've got a bunch of legal ways to do it in their terms of service. I'd argue that CocoaPods is really breaking the spirit of what GH is trying to provide.

Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs

#283

Post by bobwaycott » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 6:38 AM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #264

bobwaycott wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand how you can read "our use of git as our package manager is better than some other package managers we won't name :wink:" is an example of not understanding the problem. It looks more like someone who doesn't want to accept that the problem is on their end.

To me, that comment shows precisely that someone isn't really understanding the problem in full. It feels to me to be a deflection—of responsibility, sure, but also of admitting one doesn't understand what's really going on, and how one is at fault.

Given how rapidly the same commenter changed gears, it strikes me as plausible there was an "ohhhhh eureka" moment, and suddenly the guy got it. His followup comments began dealing with the problem after a couple other GH participants explained further what was happening and why (as well as some actionable steps to take to correct the problem for good).

But perhaps I'm being too charitable.

Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs

#284

Post by bobwaycott » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 6:39 AM UTC

pyre wrote: post #260

bobwaycott wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. If you know that you don't know what's going on. I walked away with the impression that the guy didn't actually know that.

Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs

#285

Post by manyxcxi » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 6:47 AM UTC

lazylizard wrote: post #280

manyxcxi wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)?" Nailed it. Just because someone, a team, or a company has hiring criteria doesn't mean they assume everyone wants to work at their company. It means they have an idea of who they are looking for.

nope. they also want everyone to know. its the difference between buying a packet of your favorite snacks and telling all your friends what your favorite snack is.. you probably expect them to like the same snack.

But what if they respond with a snack I've never heard of and interest me so with its description that I've just found my NEW favorite snack.

Additionally what if they inform me about my snack with information that means I can't morally choose it anymore, or that it's dangerous to my health? I now have the opportunity to switch my viewpoint, or reduce the weight that it has in my criteria.

It begins the discussion if you as the person starting the thread are interested in having it and not just looking to be agreed with. I, whether I'm in the minority or not, am always looking to start the dialog. Being agreed with is boring.

Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs

#286

Post by manyxcxi » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 6:59 AM UTC

mikemcquaid wrote: post #126

arrakeen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

taking a look at homebrew's implementation of this new API feature, i fail to see how it would dramatically reduce fetches for their (homebrew's) use case. from what i understand, it will only be called when the user manually invokes `brew update`. how often are users calling this command over and over? that being said, i do believe it could help cocoapod's use case since the fetches are done automatically (as i unde…

Hello! I'm the Homebrew maintainer and GitHub employee who wrote this. The main thing this API does for Homebrew is make no-ops really fast for `brew update`. As you point out this results in no speedup (in fact a tiny slowdown) for the case where you only run it where you know you have changes. Where it becomes useful is if you are using multiple taps (Homebrew's 3rd-party repositories) which update infrequently or…

Thank you for everything you do at Github and with Homebrew.

Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs

#287

Post by mynameisvlad » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 7:10 AM UTC

bobwaycott wrote: post #281

mynameisvlad wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, maybe I'm being overly pessimistic here, but to me it just screams of backpedaling once they saw the reaction they were receiving in this thread. The position shifted from "it's the way we architected things, how can you fix this for us" to "okay, here's some things we can do" pretty quickly and dramatically when the HN thread went up and people were reacting to the response. Cocoapods is using Github r…

I get where you're coming from. I also had a similar initial reaction. However, as I read through the subsequent discussion, it began to read as though the commenter was really not grokking the problem—and, more importantly, what to do to fix it. I thought it was very impressive that none of the GH participants reacted like some of the HN commenters here. Instead, they showed a great deal of patience and restraint in…

Yeah, I really just think it went a bit too far in the other direction and overcompensated somewhat, which is what was giving me that view. The comment with the heart emoji really stood out to me as a "huh, this might be because of HN" since it basically touched on exactly what was being criticized in here, that they weren't really appreciating what GitHub was providing for free. That said, I can totally see it just that alloy realized it on his own and wanted to make it clear. It's just that the timing of it all and the fact that it's hitting the same point kind of led me to believe that it was a reaction.

Obviously, that's not to say the sentiment isn't genuine. The eventual conclusion makes it seem that yeah, they do appreciate what GH is providing and are trying to make it less strenuous on the servers to get a better experience all round. Making it work well is really in their best interests since the users are seeing a degraded experience until something can be done about it. Definitely also happy that the right conclusion was eventually reached.

Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs

#288

Post by accatyyc » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 7:11 AM UTC

mianos wrote: post #259

wslack wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Yes, but he means that "end users" of CocoaPods are actually developers. It's a package manager for libraries.

Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs

#289

Post by zoul » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 7:13 AM UTC

joeblau wrote: post #114

zoul wrote: post #4

Another reason I consider https://github.com/Carthage/Carthage a better solution of the dependency management problem.

I really like Carthage's architecture, but there are two things I don't like about it. 1. You can't edit the frameworks unless you open a separate project, re-edit and recompile. With Pods, you can edit the Pod in your workspace. 2. Carthage doesn't go the last mile to bundle the framework into your project. If they addressed those two things, I feel like Cocoapods would probably start losing a lot of steam. Although…

I consider both points a feature. I think the Xcode project of the dependency should be a black box, I just want to get the resulting framework to add to my workspace.

Re: CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs

#290

Post by mynameisvlad » Wed, Mar 09, 2016, 7:58 AM UTC

swiley wrote: post #256

ars wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's fair, but they're really advertising a specific feature. That is, statically generated sites hosted based on a specific branch in a repository. Nowhere do they advertise themselves as a CDN in the way CocoaPods is using them now.