Comment by ddevault
6 years ago
Who's to say? It's not GitHub scale, and even if everyone in this thread moved to SourceHut, it still wouldn't be GitHub scale, but it would be serving your needs just fine. I feel totally comfortable recommending SourceHut over GitHub as a service which can be expected to have better uptime and performance, because it is a fact - even if we operate at different scales.
And I believe sr.ht would beat out GitHub at their scale anyway. The services are an order of magnitude more lightweight. And the design is more fault tolerant: we use a distributed architecture, so one part of the system can go down without affecting anything else - as if GitHub's issues could go down without anything else being affected. And many of our tools are based on email, a global fault-tolerant system, which would allow you to get your work done more or less unaffected even if SourceHut was experiencing a total outage. We'd automatically get caught back up with what you were up to in the meanwhile once we're online, too.
I've spoken to GitHub engineers about some of the internal architectural design of GitHub, too, I'm confident that SourceHut's technical design beats out GitHub's in terms of scalability. And, despite already winning by a good margin, I'm still spending a lot of effort to push the envelope further on performance and scalability.
> Who's to say?
And then you go on to say it. I'm glad that SourceHut exists, and I like many of its principles, and it's probably better designed too, but walking into a thread where someone is having an outage and then claiming that you'd do much better is in poor taste no matter how good you are or how many of your services work offline.
I responded directly to someone who said they were considering alternatives, and wouldn't've otherwise.
Right, and I think it is great to bring up how your service can handle outages better than GitHub would due to it being decentralized. The part I have issue with is saying that you'd do better than GitHub about keeping your site up, pointing to the issue that they are in the middle of resolving–that just seems like kicking them while they're down, especially since you haven't actually shown that you can do better. (Yes, you have good uptime in the past, but I don't see what's stopping the power going out to some of your servers, or you pushing a bug into production, or any number of other things that shouldn't go wrong but often do, especially as the number of users increases.)
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> SourceHut over GitHub as a service which can be expected to have better uptime and performance, because it is a fact
Most of us could throw any of the open source solutions on a $20 Linode instance and probably have excellent uptime. How many active repos do you host, and on how many servers?
About 18K git & hg repositories, for about 13.5K users. We also run about 5,000 CI jobs per week, including for some large projects like Nim and Zig, Neovim, OpenSMTPD, etc. We have 10 dedicated servers at the moment. And I didn't throw an open source solution on these servers - I built these open source services from the ground up.
So you're comparing your scalability with a company with over 40m users and 100m repos.
Can you talk about the geographic distribution of your 10 servers?
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