Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues

Re:Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues by ttul on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:26AM (#50057825)

2 billion per day is 23,148 per second on average. Perhaps peak bursts are >100K per second. That's a seriously insane number to keep up with at GitHub's scale. I've worked on systems that write >100K things per second and when it has to be globally distributed and relatively consistent within seconds, that's a very tough challenge.

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Re:Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues by bob1029 on Monday October 12, 2026 @12:03PM (#50058370)

I was very excited about this comment until I got to this part:

> That's a seriously insane number to keep up with at GitHub's scale.

What exactly is it about GitHub's workload that makes us feel like the specific 23k things happening in that slice of one second are tantamount to insanity? In my experience, much of GitHub activity is changing labels on issues and posting plaintext comments.

Technically speaking, this rate of things happening per second is well within the territory of what one large server can handle. I know it sounds wild to imply that we could run all of the GitHub public cloud off a single machine, but how crazy is it in reality when we start to consider the actual I/O bandwidth that is available in a leading edge server platform? All of VisaNet circa 2009 could run off a single mainframe. That's global. It is plausible they still operate this way.

Virtually 100% of the aspects of GitHub that would quickly saturate I/O on the transactional core can be offloaded to horizontal systems like blob storage and CDNs.

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Re:Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues by afdbcreid on Monday October 12, 2026 @01:37PM (#50059892)

I have difficulty finding what exactly is talked about as 2b per day, but it is not all operations. GitHub saw 473.3 billion events per month lately (https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...), or ~183K events per second on average. So the 2b number is something much more expensive.

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Re:Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues by CharlieDigital on Monday October 12, 2026 @04:52PM (#50062926)

    > What exactly is it about GitHub's workload that makes us feel like the specific 23k things happening in that slice of one second are tantamount to insanity?
    >
    > Technically speaking, this rate of things happening per second is well within the territory *of what one large server can handle*

...for real?

Just as a mental exercise, consider what is happening when a GH action kicks off and everything involved in that.

The amount of write I/O we're talking about here is absolutely massive just on the GH side of it.

A Netflix or Hulu serving videos isn't the same thing because that is a read-heavy workload that works great in CDNs. GitHub has massive amounts of write volume.

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Re:Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues by MattDamonSpace on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:34AM (#50057931)

I’d call it impossible if they weren’t already (mostly) doing it

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Re:Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues by ctvo on Monday October 12, 2026 @12:03PM (#50058374)

Impossible is a very strong word. There are core systems at all the major cloud providers with the same constraints handling more requests per second.

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Re:Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues by soanvig on Monday October 12, 2026 @04:33PM (#50062640)

It is huge scale, but on the other hand, almost entire GitHub although huge, is made of isolated islands of data (repositories). This is relatively easy to scale. Extreme example would be dedicated server for each repo and its Actions with their own isolated state.

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