[pyeri]

But this time it's different because most high traffic subs have already gone dark, so the traffic must be minimal as there will be very few posters relative to what the server can handle. And yet, I'm getting "You broke reddit" when I try to visit which is quite ironical.

[treis]

Probably a massive shift of traffic to still open subs. That'd probably take it down due to caches suddenly having all the wrong data. No inside info, though.

HN seems to be groaning under the load too and might go down with Reddit.

[rozap]

Maybe it's expensive to generate the 403 for a private subreddit.

A place I once worked had a 404 handler that was extremely expensive, but nobody noticed for a while because 404s are relatively rare. One time a vulnerability scanner took down the site because it was just hitting known vulnerability paths which all 404'd. The code that executed during a 404 was n^2.

[rspoerri]

As long as n=1 it‘s no problem :-)

[rozap]

That's exactly why the problem didn't reveal itself for a while :)