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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)

#31

Post by reissbaker »

ipaddr wrote: post #16
sebzim4500 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds plausible. There are probably many queries required to display a page and Facebook has 2 billion daily active users.

This is how information slowly changes. The original numbers from facebook needed to be taken with a grain of salt. 2 billion a day raises it more. Facebook claims to have 2 billion accounts but no where near 2 billion unique accounts. I don't know what facebook calls an active user but it use to mean logged in once in the past 30 days.

No, the person you're responding to was correct. Facebook has over 2 billion daily active users [1], and DAU refers to unique users who used the product in a day [2].

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...

2: https://www.innertrends.com/blog/active-users-measuring-busi...

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

#32

Post by guessmyname »

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…

Have you tried navigating the website using a web proxy (Charles, Burp Suite, or similar tool) to intercept the HTTP request(s) in order to replay them yourself multiple times to see if the latency is consistent? It’d be interesting to discover that the delay is fabricated using the front-end code or if the back-end server is really the problem. I don’t use Facebook but I asked a friend just now and the response time for the notifications panel to appear is between 500ms-2000ms, which is relatively fast for web interactions.

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

#33

Post by jojobas »

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.

98% of Meta's revenue is from ads. Meta is an ads department.

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

#34

Post by tuyguntn »

danpalmer wrote: post #28

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 o…

it's really great to have such capabilities, but adding them has a cost where only few can afford. Cost in terms of investing in building those, which impacts your feature build velocity and the maintenance

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

#35

Post by bee_rider »

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.

It is an ad company, everyone there works on ads or indirectly works on making a platform for ads.

The only exception is people who’ve managed to sneak their way into positions where they don’t contribute anything to the company. Those people are doing society a favor by wasting Facebook’s money.

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

#36

Post by zerkten »

tuyguntn wrote: post #34
danpalmer wrote: post #28

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 o…

it's really great to have such capabilities, but adding them has a cost where only few can afford. Cost in terms of investing in building those, which impacts your feature build velocity and the maintenance

Can you be specific about the cost of building these?

I've run into many situations where something was deemed costly, is found out later, and the team ultimately has implement it all while hoping no one groks that is was predicted. "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39472693) is related.

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

#37

Post by iraqmtpizza »

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…

at least once youtube slowed to a crawl until I cleared the cookie

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

#40

Post by ipaddr »

reissbaker wrote: post #31
ipaddr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how information slowly changes. The original numbers from facebook needed to be taken with a grain of salt. 2 billion a day raises it more. Facebook claims to have 2 billion accounts but no where near 2 billion unique accounts. I don't know what facebook calls an active user but it use to mean logged in once in the past 30 days.

No, the person you're responding to was correct. Facebook has over 2 billion daily active users [1], and DAU refers to unique users who used the product in a day [2]. 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d... 2: https://www.innertrends.com/blog/active-users-measuring-busi...

It's directly in the link you provided.

"For example, an active user can be measured as a user that has logged back into her account to interact with the product in the last 30 days."

Even the marketing material is designed to confuse.

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