[dietr1ch]

> Roughly 111 GB of RAM. Which is like nothing to a search giant.

You are forgetting job replication. A global service can easily have 100s of jobs on 10-20 datacenters. Saving 111TiB of RAM can probably pay your salary forever. I think I paid mine with fewer savings while there. During covid there was a RAM shortage too enough to have a call to prefer trading CPU to save RAM with changes to the rule of thumb resource costs.

[nomel]

> A global service can easily have 100s of jobs on 10-20 datacenters.

There's obviously, something in between maintaining the latency with 20 datacenter, increasing the latency a bit reducing hosting to a couple $100 worth of servers, and setting the latency to infinity, which was the original plan.

[dietr1ch]

I'm guessing that they ran out of leeway with small tweaks and found that breaking inactive links was probably a better way out. We don't know the hit rates of what they call inactive nor the real cost it takes to keep them around.

A service like this is probably on maintenance mode too, so simplifying it to use fewer resources probably makes sense, and I bet the PMs are happy about shorter links, since at some point you are better off not using a link shortener and instead just use a QR code in fear of inconvenience and typos.