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by alpaca128 1777 days ago
> And as the "app too busy" error message proves, there is a lot more to a site than it's front end alone

I get at least monthly "our servers are busy" messages when accessing Reddit, and their (redesigned) website is so bloated that it takes great effort to replicate such bad performance in a simple clone.

Reddit is the one site where you really can't make this argument, it's bloat incarnate.
1 comments
arghwhat 1777 days ago
It does handle many orders of magnitude more users than this thing does though. As a site that is the source of many hugs of death, it's serving a hell of a lot of traffic, mostly successfully.

It could serve even more traffic if it was less bloated of course.

EDIT: Some random stats from 2019 suggest that they're handling ~1000 pageviews a second on average over a month, and a view can take >100 requests to load. Combine with surge load and you're dealing with some serious requests per second.

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colejohnson66 1777 days ago
Over 100 requests per load? That has to be static files like images, right? Do they not have a cache system for that (like what Cloudflare provides)?
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spiralx 1775 days ago
Articles, thumbnails, comments, votes, awards, users, I'm sure it all adds up considering the dynamic nature of what each user sees. And they do do a lot of caching to make it work:

https://redditblog.com/2017/1/17/caching-at-reddit/

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MattGaiser 1777 days ago
A friend worked on a project that reached several hundred requests at one point.

Basically they had a 10 request component. Only one on the page so even though it wasn't that efficient, they didn't care.

But then their PM wanted 20 of them on a page. It was a Scrum team so velocity mattered, so they just had a for loop generate 20 of them.

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