[seldo]

I'm sorry my response looked like I was blaming them, that wasn't my intention. Like I said, it was an honest mistake: these things happen, and they handled it well.

Once we determined 404s were the problem we put mitigation in place that worked fine, but the problem of request volume remained: the 10% figure I gave was at a 5% rollout of VSCode. A full rollout would therefore have meant the registry became 3x bigger overnight and two thirds of that would have been 404s to VSCode users. At that point the issue is financial, not technical, which is another reason the rollback happened.

[joepie91_]

Hmm. What is the "mitigation"?

[seldo]

More efficiently handling 404s, which as many have pointed out we were handling quite naïvely.

[joepie91_]

Right, but I'm curious what exactly the issue was (on a technical level), and how you've mitigated it. This might be useful knowledge for other people building similar things, to avoid making the same mistakes :)

[seldo]

Check out my detailed answer a few comments down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12861180

[i336_]

Hi, I just wanted to say kudos for this little reply thread.

Many times I've seen someone on HN write a negative/flaming reply to a comment, which then nets a bunch of further agreement and consensus, and the original commentator is nowhere to be seen.

You quickly responded and fully acknowledged the faux pas (nuking any negative consensus), then you replied twice more, and one of those replies was to a request for technical info.

/o/