Disabled at 22 million commits

iirc remember some years ago the homebrew repo caused too much load due to their architecture where every client would pull on install or update. Or something like that.

Part of the GitHub response afaik included the info that they went as far as they could with dedicated and beefier servers but asked for a software fix.

I would think that if GitHub anticipates a normal repo growing this large they can give it the special treatment

The mindset around programming and exploration in general is in a sad state. I don’t understand why we have so much hate here for things like this. Better that someone like this find it then someone who noticies it and spins up 1000s of repos to do the exact same thing.

I think the sentiment here shows the current state that software engineering has devolved into. It’s a 9-5 where you put in minimal work and get mad when someone breaks your system because you might have to do an hour of work to fix it on your weekend.

The author used up so much of github's resources that it impacted other users. 22 million commits is probably enough that something started to hit a linear or n-log-n scaling function, setting off an alarm on some metric. Yeah, you get in trouble for that.

I'm reminded of a time in high school where my friend almost got himself banned from the school computers.

At home he had dial-up internet (it was 2003 and he lived in a very rural area). But at school he had megabits of bandwidth he could (ab)use. So he started pirating everything on the internet using a computer nobody ever used in a side-room of the library. It ran 24/7 downloading his long list of desires: games, movies, tv series, etc. He stored his spoils on his network drive, which had no limits on how much it could hold (until he got caught). He'd occasionally bring in a hard drive, copy everything that fit on it and bring it home with him on the school bus.

But all good things must end.

The network admin for the school board eventually came by and sat him down. He showed my friend a pie chart where, as he described it to me, "my name was on the portion that took up more than 2/3 of the pie". After a conversation, all the data got deleted, my friend got a stern warning, and somehow didn't get into any worse trouble than that.

> there's no v1 and v2 repositories for example

We wouldn’t know. GitHub is probably running something very different to normal local git including optimizations for performance and cost.

They must only ensure API/protocol compatibility and could have already replaced everything else many times over.

A long time ago, the math column in Scientific American decided to run a contest. It asked readers to send a post card with the biggest number they could think of. Whoever came up with the biggest number would win $1 million--divided by the winning number.

The editor of the magazine almost stopped the contest because he worried that someone might actually win real money and the magazine would be on the hook. But the author reassured him: human nature being what it is, the winning number is going to be not only larger than 1 million, but much larger than you can imagine.

And so it was. The winning number was (IIRC) some tower of exponentials that would take most of the universe to write out as decimal digits. The SciAm budget was safe.

If readers had coordinated somehow, they could have won a million dollars from SciAm and divided it among themselves. They might have made a hundred dollars each. But the author knew that such coordination would be impossible. Human nature would not allow it. Someone, somewhere, was going to send in a ridiculously large number to win. Classic Prisoner's Dilemma.

The GitHub case is the same. Human nature being what it is, someone, somewhere is always going to try to push the limits. As the developer of a SaaS development platform, this is something I'm taking to heart.