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Disabled at 22 million commits

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Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But the next largest legitimate repo is going to be something like 20M commits shy of that, so it seems like it's excellent that GH engineers only just started to care.

It's entirely possible that such a load test has been considered, but deemed non-realistic so not prioritised for some time. If I were running the QA team I'd be annoyed if time were spent on abusive destructive testing than realistic testing that real-world users may experience, especially because load testing like this would have to be on an identical environment to PROD so rather expensive.

It reminds me of that old QA joke:

A QA engineer walks into a bar and orders a beer. She orders 2 beers.

She orders 0 beers.

She orders -1 beers.

She orders a lizard.

She orders a NULLPTR.

She tries to leave without paying.

Satisfied, she declares the bar ready for business. The first customer comes in an orders a beer. They finish their drink, and then ask where the bathroom is.

The bar explodes.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#62

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…

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.

I addressed this in another downthread reply. Briefly, I agree. My quibble isn’t with the term “abuse”, only the nature of its intent.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, in the case of the Tor network its whole premise is that it's resilient to attack. So either it is or it isn't. If it's resilient but only as long as people treat it nicely, then it's not actually resilient. And anyone who can demonstrate that is doing a public service. It would be irresponsible to discover a flaw and not disclose it, or to continuously exploit it. But it's not irresponsible to look for the flaw in the first place.

In the case of GitHub, it's owned by a nearly trillion dollar corporation. Nobody is hurting some mom and pop business here.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#64
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Git commit timestamps are 100% fudgeable. You could implement this based on GitHub repository age, but the assumptions would break for imported repos.

(Understanding we’re waaaay off in edge case territory here and this is all basically academic.)

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#65

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.

I don't know what happened behind the scenes. But I thought it was amusing when one of our mutual fund customers tried purchasing one share of each of the ~1000 funds we offered in our catalog. It obviously broke things; there were various UI things we hadn't tested for that kind of portfolio.

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#66

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

You can clone a few latest commits

  git clone -–depth [depth] [remote-url]

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#68
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I guess that’s my question: is it? Does that inference pass any kind of smell test with basically any non-toy repo?

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#69
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...

> I don’t blame GH at all.

I don't really see anyone blaming GitHub, not even the original post, I'm not sure why all the responses here are insinuating that?

Re: Disabled at 22 million commits

#70
post #26

I’m surprised at the reaction in these comments. Somebody curiously pushing the limits of a service to see what would happen is very much in the spirit of all hackers. Meanwhile, GitHub responded appropriately, and his write up agrees.

Someone potentially taking the service down for everyone, you know, just out of curiosity. Which part of this curiosity you need GitHub for? I'm curious how well GitHub handles DDoS attacks, what's their limit. Let's DDoS and find out, it will be fun!
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