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Disabled at 22 million commits

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Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#41

Post by lucb1e »

RexM wrote: post #36
lucb1e wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why not try locally with git. Because you can't. GitHub is not open source, you'd need to steal the source code to try it locally. This comment is for educational purposes only, not trying to give OP ideas!!1 But you're right in spirit of course. Would be more interesting to install Forgejo/Gitea, GitLab, GitWeb, gitolite, TortoiseGit, etc., test them on various limits, and write that up in a nice blog post for mag…

git runs outside of GitHub, which is what the comment you responded to was saying. Test the behavior of git locally, without testing GitHub.

I understood the comment, but that's not what OP was testing. They were doing the commits via merging pull requests. Git has no concept of a pull request and no HTTP API. From the post:

> The GitHub API has periodic issues merging/creating PRs. (I use PRs since that is more reliable than keeping a local master up to date via pulling at this point).

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#42

Post by BeefySwain »

Sidestepping all of the ethical questions of embarking on this "research", I'm surprised the number was that low.

Linux[0] itself has about 1.2 million commits, so apparently Linux is within an order of magnitude of bringing GitHub to it's knees?

[0] https://github.com/torvalds/linux

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#43

Post by eyelidlessness »

rat9988 wrote: post #27
eyelidlessness wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the author is trying to insinuate that GitHub is in the wrong in any way. They explicitly say they understand the decision, and anticipated that it would happen. I don’t want to quibble with the term “abuse”, because I think in this scenario it depends on whether intent is a factor and whether we should trust their stated intent. But depending on how you look at it, GitHub would be just as likely to ben…

It is malicious as he knows he will harm the service to be able to draw whatever conclusion. This is not a case where the end justifies the means.

The first time I wrote and shared any kind of interactive code, it took approximately five minutes for someone to XSS it. At the time, I was pretty miffed too. After a polite explanation that the “abuse” was curiosity about defensive measures I’d taken, I understood pretty suddenly that there was a whole scope of programming I hadn’t even considered.

More than 20 years later, I still remember the enormous benefit that little bit of malice has bestowed on me and my career. And every time I’ve been on the receiving end of such an exploratory exploit since has been exponentially more appreciated.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#44

Post by tedunangst »

orf wrote: post #21
DocTomoe wrote: post #3

[flagged]

Many people have mentioned that this is incorrect, but I wanted to ask why you thought this, and why you thought it so confidently? The Linux kernel repo contains 1.1 million commits and 80k files on master. That would mean a naive total of 88,000,000,000 files being stored as a “full copy of the repository”. Does this pass the smell test?

"Git stores a copy of the repo" is not an entirely unreasonable inference to draw from "git does not store deltas".

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#45

Post by guraf »

lucb1e wrote: post #24
iBotPeaches wrote: post #7

> I decided to see how many commits GitHub (and git) could take before acting kind of wonky. At ~19 million commits (and counting) to master: it’s wonky. This just doesn't seem right to me. Why? Its obvious at some point you'll harm the service. If the goal was to test it, why not try locally with git.

> why not try locally with git. Because you can't. GitHub is not open source, you'd need to steal the source code to try it locally. This comment is for educational purposes only, not trying to give OP ideas!!1 But you're right in spirit of course. Would be more interesting to install Forgejo/Gitea, GitLab, GitWeb, gitolite, TortoiseGit, etc., test them on various limits, and write that up in a nice blog post for mag…

Testing git, which was a stated goal, could have been done locally.

It's obvious that the author is lying about that part, he only wanted to push GitHub to its limit, but he did say git:

> I decided to see how many commits GitHub (and git) could take before acting kind of wonky. At ~19 million commits (and counting) to master: it’s wonky.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#46

Post by eyelidlessness »

ranting-moth wrote: post #30
eyelidlessness wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the author is trying to insinuate that GitHub is in the wrong in any way. They explicitly say they understand the decision, and anticipated that it would happen. I don’t want to quibble with the term “abuse”, because I think in this scenario it depends on whether intent is a factor and whether we should trust their stated intent. But depending on how you look at it, GitHub would be just as likely to ben…

Load testing someone else's system resulting in a manual staff intervention due to potential system destabilization at 6am? It's a wordplay to call that anything else than abuse.

Okay, but I explicitly declined to quibble with the term. But I’ll go one further: I’ll concede the action qualifies as abuse. If there’s any quibbling worth quibbling, it’s between whether the author’s figurative abuse-hat was white or grey.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#47

Post by tikhonj »

BeefySwain wrote: post #42

Sidestepping all of the ethical questions of embarking on this "research", I'm surprised the number was that low. Linux[0] itself has about 1.2 million commits, so apparently Linux is within an order of magnitude of bringing GitHub to it's knees? [0] https://github.com/torvalds/linux

There's a rough rule of thumb that you should expect to redesign your system to handle each order of magnitude increase in scale, and I figure it applies here too—gracefully handling that size of repo would require substantial engineering work, and they have plenty of time to handle it before human-oriented open source repos get even close to the current limit.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#48

Post by lucb1e »

thewataccount wrote: post #37
lucb1e wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not like it would take a lot of code to check on push if the repository has more than 10k commits per day since its creation date or something, to stop such abuse. Doesn't thwart existing repositories with millions of commits (Linux is at ~2M) and gives time to formulate a long-term plan for what's allowed and what's paid or just disallowed. So even if people were to try, I don't see that being a big bother. Not that…

I don't think you can limit pure commit counts though, because you can push many commits/massive history changes in one go. Monorepo's in particular could be impacted

Good point, perhaps (age_in_years+1)×1M would be a better limit. Anyone wanting to import more than 1M commits could get a paid tier or beg support. At any rate, not that hard to implement is what I would expect

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#49

Post by Kwpolska »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #23
Kwpolska wrote: post #15

> I’ve also asked if they can re-enable it so I can give one more commit to say the final results on the readme then (public) archive it. Entitled much? The author should be happy GitHub didn't just ban them for violating the ToS and intentionally trying to break things.

They asked . They didn’t demand, and they seem prepared to accept whatever GitHub decides. If I were fielding that request, I’d certainly grant it—on the condition that any deviation from the stated intent would indeed result in a ban—purely on the basis that it’s a ~free QA contribution and postmortem.

Keeping the repository, even as a public archive, would still require a lot of resources on GitHub's side. The only fair thing to do here would be to apologize and ask for the repo to be deleted.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#50

Post by metabagel »

BeefySwain wrote: post #42

Sidestepping all of the ethical questions of embarking on this "research", I'm surprised the number was that low. Linux[0] itself has about 1.2 million commits, so apparently Linux is within an order of magnitude of bringing GitHub to it's knees? [0] https://github.com/torvalds/linux

I think it’s a rate issue, not the number of commits.
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