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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)

#41

Post by ipaddr »

ipaddr wrote: post #40
reissbaker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It should be their account not her account (or his). Who writes this garbage.

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

guessmyname wrote: post #32
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…

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by paganel »

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…

> it will take a good 20 seconds to load the list of new notifications.

Same thing here. Thought it was my (relatively much) slower Internet connection, or maybe that I had something "wrong" (what exactly that might have been, I don't know).

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

#44

Post by pests »

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.

Different metrics Daily vs Monthly Active User. MAU vs DAU

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

#45

Post by rcxdude »

ipaddr wrote: post #40
reissbaker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a monthly active user. A daily active user would be someone who logged into an account in the last day. Generally monthly active user count will be higher than daily active users, but for something like Facebook the difference is about 50% (which is what the second article linked is explaining, if you read more than just cherry-picking a line that matches your preconceptions)

And yes, that's a claim that if each user is a separate person, >20% of the world's population interacts with Facebook at least minimally each day. You can add your own interpretation about how many of the accounts are bots or otherwise duplicates, but it's a staggering amount either way.

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

#46

Post by yodsanklai »

ndriscoll wrote: post #15
Banditoz wrote: post #2

Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?!

Facebook makes over 300 requests for me just loading the main logged in page while showing me exactly 1 timeline item. Hovering my mouse over that item makes another 100 requests or so. Scrolling down loads another item at the cost of over 100 requests again. It's impressive in a perverse way just how inefficient they can be while managing to make it still work, and somewhat disturbing that their ads bring in enough…

Could someone tell me what these hundreds of requests could do?

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

#47

Post by spacebanana7 »

zerkten wrote: post #36
tuyguntn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The developer, tester and devops time required to properly implement graceful degradation could easily accumulate to hundreds of hours.

Those hours are directly expensive when your developers cost hundreds of dollars a day; and have a material opportunity cost in that their commitment to one particular project delays the delivery of other features.

Moreover, any new features would have to be made compatible with the graceful degradation pattern, creating an ongoing cost.

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

#48

Post by akira2501 »

ndriscoll wrote: post #15
Banditoz wrote: post #2

Am I reading the second figure right? Facebook can do 130*10^6 queries/second == ‭130,000,000‬ queries/second?!

Facebook makes over 300 requests for me just loading the main logged in page while showing me exactly 1 timeline item. Hovering my mouse over that item makes another 100 requests or so. Scrolling down loads another item at the cost of over 100 requests again. It's impressive in a perverse way just how inefficient they can be while managing to make it still work, and somewhat disturbing that their ads bring in enough…

This is the company that instead of ditching PHP created a full on PHP to C++ transpiler and then deployed their while site on that for a few years.

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

#49

Post by akira2501 »

bee_rider wrote: post #18
bagels wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't comment on the numbers, but think of how many engineers work there and how many users Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram have. Each engineer is adding new features and queries every day. You're going to get a lot of queries.

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.

The waste of talent hours is directly connected to climate change. The waste of network bandwidth is as well as the waste of compute cycles to run these "social" platforms.

That all being said, as humans have free will, imagining what we "could have done" if we just _forced_ everyone to do something different is flirting with fascism.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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