Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
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Re: Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
#2Two days ago, Reddit ids have finally incremented passed the 2,147,483,647, or the maximum range of a signed int32. It seems one of Reddit's subsystems, the one that serves its photo albums broke due to the integer overflow.
Re: Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
#3A long time ago we discovered Twitter used a round robin of three servers for assigning IDs to tweets. We inferred the round robin was done by doing mod 3 of a signed int32, and because that space doesn't divide neatly by two it meant one of the three servers saw less load than the others and we could map ID assignment volume according to how often it overflowed and hence estimate total tweet volume for a given period.
Some of the details escape me (this was a decade ago) but it was a fun combination of statistical inference and CS knowledge that I don't get to use often. Whenever integer overflow comes up in a systems engineering context I get a little tickled.
Re: Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
#4Two days ago, Reddit ids have finally incremented passed the 2,147,483,647, or the maximum range of a signed int32. It seems one of Reddit's subsystems, the one that serves its photo albums broke due to the integer overflow.
Someone probably joked they would never reach that scale when they wrote that code
Re: Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
#5Two days ago, Reddit ids have finally incremented passed the 2,147,483,647, or the maximum range of a signed int32. It seems one of Reddit's subsystems, the one that serves its photo albums broke due to the integer overflow.
Someone probably joked they would never reach that scale when they wrote that code
Thinking "if that ever gets anywhere close to a problem we'll have vast resources and plenty of time to fix it" and then, I'm guessing, that person left a few months later and nobody owned that part of the code because it worked.
Then 10 or so years went by...
Whenever I write code like that which may break in say, 5 years, I'll sign it in the comments and put my personal email and phone number inviting future people to call me and I'll fix it for free (cause I take responsibilities for my code pretty seriously). Nobody has ever taken me up on it though...
Re: Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
#6The famous AUTO_INCREMENT that you though you would never reach...
Re: Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
#7A classic case of "ids aren't numbers even if you choose to make them numeric"
Re: Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
#8Two days ago, Reddit ids have finally incremented passed the 2,147,483,647, or the maximum range of a signed int32. It seems one of Reddit's subsystems, the one that serves its photo albums broke due to the integer overflow.
Someone probably joked they would never reach that scale when they wrote that code
So you migrate to int64 and one day someone will wonder why the hell did we ever think no one would reach 2^64 rows in a database table. Or that 2^128 IP addresses would be enough for everyone.
Re: Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
#9Two days ago, Reddit ids have finally incremented passed the 2,147,483,647, or the maximum range of a signed int32. It seems one of Reddit's subsystems, the one that serves its photo albums broke due to the integer overflow.
Strange thing is that photo albums re relatively new. Imgur was the go-to host for Reddit, and then they made their own uploader a looong time later. The "albums" functionality only came out in July of 2020, according to a Google search.
Seems this was less likely a "someone else will deal with it" problem, and more of a development / QA testing problem.
Re: Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone probably joked they would never reach that scale when they wrote that code
Thinking "if that ever gets anywhere close to a problem we'll have vast resources and plenty of time to fix it" and then, I'm guessing, that person left a few months later and nobody owned that part of the code because it worked. Then 10 or so years went by... Whenever I write code like that which may break in say, 5 years, I'll sign it in the comments and put my personal email and phone number inviting future people…
And they weren't even wrong! The challenge is addressing the tech-debt, not the choice to incur it.