Re:Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
by lokar on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @05:18PM
(#49352871)
A good rule of thumb I once heard (from Jeff Dean, I think) was that (in a complex system) every 10X you go up in scale you need to re-consider basic design elements, trade-offs, etc, and probably change some of them.
It's hard to design something (large and complex) for much more than 10X scale with only HW capacity increases.
Re:Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
by transcriptase on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @01:58PM
(#49364901)
There are iirc some good write ups from years ago by employees at Blizzard about these things and why “spinning up more servers” wouldn’t suddenly let millions of people login to games simultaneously on launch days.
Additional load reveals limits and breaklines that were never known before - your temporary integer IDs are suddenly too small, you reach the maximum file descriptors in a Linux distro, your hash function suddenly has repeating conflicts, your DB index is suddenly oversaturated.
Having massive exponential growth of your traffic would probably require constant refactoring to meet the ever changing system limits.