[JonAtkinson]

I'd be interested to better understand the timeline around this statement:

"Metaserver was stuck on a deprecated legacy framework that unsurprisingly had poor performance and caused maintenance headaches due to esoteric bugs. For example, the legacy framework only supports HTTP/1.0 while modern libraries have moved to HTTP/1.1 as the minimum version."

Dropbox has been around for a lot of years, and raised a lot of cash; was it only recently that they could pay down this technical debt? Were they really so busy in other areas that this was allowed to fester?

[muglug]

There's normally some sort of budget for paying down technical debt – presumably there was more pressing technical debt.

[wittekm]

(I was at Dropbox from 2015-2020)

The legacy framework was Pylons, which eventually evolved into Pyramid.

The tldr is there were hundreds of unowned endpoints that, yes, were allowed to fester. They eventually got ownership on all endpoints, so you had somebody to exert pressure on to make things happen.