Comment by dspillett
3 years ago
> They should've picked a proper language that's able to perform and handle those requests like Go or Rust. Building a social network, especially distributed, and using a low performance language... what were they thinking?
Even if a Go or Rust variant of exactly the same implementation would have been two or three times faster, it would not have survived the same onslaught. The way to survive that sort of accidental DDoS is not to change language but to improve algorithm choices where possible (where that makes a difference in order, not just a small difference in scale), make sure you are scaling efficiently over the CPU cores (possible in all those languages in various ways) available per node without busting memory limits, and by scaling out once that becomes a limiting factor.
This was effectively a DDoS situation (not an attack, but from the server's PoV there is no difference between a malicious DDoS and a hug-of-death from a mass of interested parties) and using Go or Rust instead of Ruby would likely have made no difference what so ever.
(the rest of your post is not discussing technical matters pertaining to the rest of the thread so I'll not encourage the off-topic-mess by responding in any detail, other than to say that sort of complaint wrt handling potentially contentious issues is common on social networks and not Mastodon specific)
No comments yet
Contribute on Hacker News ↗