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Disabled at 22 million commits

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Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#51

Post by lucb1e »

tikhonj wrote: post #47
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.

I'm not sure redesigns were necessary between going 1 to 10, from 10 to 100, from 100 to 1000, from 1000 to 10'000, from 10'000 to 100'000, or from 100'000 to 1000'000 which we're now at. It sounds like a sensible engineering rule, but I'm not sure it translates to software, or at least not in this case. I don't know of any design changes made to Git since it was first created, there's no v1 and v2 repositories for example.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#52

Post by rafark »

MBCook wrote: post #9

So the author was purposefully trying to do the most extreme thing they could to see how git/GitHub act/break. I don’t blame GH at all. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230702215522/https://sh.itjust...

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#53

Post by adamckay »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #20
ranting-moth wrote: post #14

More correct title would be "GitHub stopped abuse after 22M commits". There is absolutely nothing wrong with GH stopping that and it's very wrong to insinuate otherwise like OP is doing. Wouldn't be surprised if GH would permaban him.

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…

> GitHub would be just as likely to benefit from hiring the author as they would from banning

For what purpose?

Creating an infinite loop that updates a file and commits it is hardly worthy of a job offer.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#54

Post by rafark »

Kwpolska wrote: post #49
eyelidlessness wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And could be seen as a reward or an encouragement for other people to abuse the service.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#55

Post by adamckay »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #39
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.

GitHub offers the service for free and doesn't publish or enforce any specific limit on number of commits. I see nothing wrong with a user pushing as many commits to it as possible. It's not his problem when to stop it. This is also how I feel about the Tor project getting their knickers twisted over people who do research on the live network. If the network can't handle it, then it's not resilient to attack. Asking…

It's this kind of attitude that's why we can't have nice things, though.

A service is offered for free, with no documented limits or restrictions, so you push the service to its breaking point... Just to see what happens?

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#56

Post by eddythompson80 »

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

Microsoft’s azure docs repo has 1.1M commits, and it’s many gigabytes big. I made the mistake of trying to clone it to fix an issue in the docs I ran into. Ended up just editing it on GitHub because fuck that.

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#57

Post by eyelidlessness »

adamckay wrote: post #53
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…

> GitHub would be just as likely to benefit from hiring the author as they would from banning For what purpose? Creating an infinite loop that updates a file and commits it is hardly worthy of a job offer.

They seemed fairly surprised by the fact it happened, and let it go on for some time. Which strongly suggests they hadn’t considered such a load test on their own. If I had a budget/head count, I’d at minimum put out a feeler for a QA role.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#58

Post by mtone »

asadawadia wrote: post #35
DocTomoe wrote: post #3

[flagged]

i remember reading that too https://willi.am/blog/2014/10/14/for-the-last-time-git-store...

Assuming it's correct, I think this answer explains it well: https://stackoverflow.com/a/31996121/283879

Basically, yes it may write snapshots per-file (never per-commit) locally but there is a separate routine to transparently repack the whole thing with deltas.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#59

Post by femto113 »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #20
ranting-moth wrote: post #14

More correct title would be "GitHub stopped abuse after 22M commits". There is absolutely nothing wrong with GH stopping that and it's very wrong to insinuate otherwise like OP is doing. Wouldn't be surprised if GH would permaban him.

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…

Deliberately trying to create an extreme situation in order to find when/where/how a service breaks is inarguably "abuse" regardless of whether the intent was malign.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#60

Post by eyelidlessness »

rafark wrote: post #54
Kwpolska wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And could be seen as a reward or an encouragement for other people to abuse the service.

They already do incentivize white hat exploit efforts[1]. The author seems to have run afoul of one of their rules[2] by impacting other users, but I don’t think that impact could be knowable without trying.

GitHub could trivially honor the request without changing the incentives or even taking any defensive implementation action, by specifically citing this experiment in the rules and maybe adding some more specific wording to the TOS.

1: https://bounty.github.com/

2: https://bounty.github.com/#rules

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