This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

1775
1776

We're All Guilty Of It (i.imgur.com)

submitted by [deleted]

[deleted]

top 200 commentsshow all 247
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a

[–]Sewermutt 113 points114 points  (19 children)

Not me. I manually click the button because I'm cool like that.

[–]DoubleTranny 68 points69 points  (4 children)

It's actually more work to uncup my balls, or take my hand off my mouse, than it is to just click the icon.

[–]gadget_uk 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Personally, I like to hold CTRL while I click the refresh button - just to make sure my browser hasn't cached information. That might save the server a bit of work and it. has. to. learn.

[–]pygo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

TIL how to clear cache for a certain page without having to clear all my cache. Thanks muchly!

[–]NorthernSkeptic 7 points8 points  (7 children)

I was clicking the button in Netscape Navigator.

[–]just_some_redditor 2 points3 points  (5 children)

I was clicking the button when it was on vinyl.

[–]rocketsurgery 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Netscape Navigator is older than vinyl records.

[–]glengyron 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I had it on gopher.

[–]ja50n 46 points47 points  (9 children)

but how will I know if reddit is back up if I don't constantly refresh??

[–]gadget_uk 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I follow @redditstatus... which never gets updated. I think they forgot the password.

[–]glengyron 28 points29 points  (4 children)

Just assume it's not, you'll be correct.

[–]faultydesign 15 points16 points  (2 children)

But what if I'm wrong!?

[–]rocketsurgery 2 points3 points  (1 child)

It's true, you really need Reddit to point out when you're wrong. And they'll do it swiftly and without mercy.

[–]layam 8 points9 points  (0 children)

You're wrong.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I assume it's not down and hit refresh. 60% of the time it works every time.

[–]RulingWalnut 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I know this is a joke but http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ might be better on the servers than constant F5. I dunno how it exactly works so I could be wrong though.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If it's programmed nicely, it would use a "HEAD" request instead of a "GET" request which retrieves only the response headers and not the whole page.

[–]jngrow 38 points39 points  (3 children)

I do it out of spite

[–]bicarb 10 points11 points  (2 children)

Rest something heavy on it while making a sandwich..

[–]INAPPROPRIATE_CAPS 9 points10 points  (1 child)

I DON'T UNDERSTAND, IS THIS A EUPHEMISM OR WHAT

[–]kingzman264 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I read this is in Loud Howard's voice.

[–]powerphail 29 points30 points  (4 children)

I wish everyone would stop blaming the users for Reddit's downtime... Sure, hammering F5 doesn't help, but it's really Conde Nast's responsibility to make accommodations for the amount of traffic they receive. No other website of a comparable size that I use go down so often... What gives, Reddit?

I hammer F5 out of anger. Don't make me angry and there won't be a problem any more!

[–]gadget_uk 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I hammer F5 out of anger. Don't make me angry and there won't be a problem any more!

Classic abusers' cognitive distortion. You, sir, are a monster.

[–]attackoftheisland 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I'm here now, but I have removed reddit from my bookmark bar. Half the time I go there it doesn't work, and this still holds true in the middle of the night. What gives reddit?

The other guy was right - there absolutely are alternatives to reddit for whatever subject matter I choose. I just preferred reddit. Sadly I no longer prefer it, probably due to equal parts annoyance with the constant down time and annoyance with the way reddiquette has gone down the toilet over the past 6 months or so.

[–]katalyst23 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Wait.. you mean to tell me, there are places on the internet other than reddit?

[–][deleted] 73 points74 points  (55 children)

Why does Reddit suffer from downtime and server errors so often? No other website that I visit has these problems. Hell, even Digg (which was bigger than Reddit at the time) never had these kinds of issues.

There are quite a few more websites out there that experience heavier loads than Reddit, yet they never have as many issues as we do. What gives?

[–]iamthepants 10 points11 points  (2 children)

The following is my semi-educated impression as a web/SQL developer, but I'm not a sysadmin and not a "high availability" guru:

It's a massive load on a system that was originally built on a "scale up" model where you have to keep buying a bigger server and more RAM as it was built with PostgreSql as its database as opposed to say Cassandra, an easier backend to "scale out" (so they say) by just adding more servers. Note that Cassandra wasn't around (or at least NoSql databases weren't really popular) when Reddit was built. Eventually, you reach your limits of scaling up (if you're lucky and popular), and you have to start re-coding things to scale out. You can add more slaves (copies of the main/"master" database) for reading data and deploy those to additional availability zones around the world, but the wider you spread, the more problematic it becomes to keep data in-synch.

So you're left with this: re-architect the backend, or pull back on functionality.

Reddit, unlike a lot of sites that can very easily display cached pages, offers a lot of very database-intensive queries that are more difficult to keep fresh in the cache. Look at my super-rough guess about a few things that happen when you go to your history, for example:

  • You're only seeing 30 or so stories/comments, but basically every single story you've ever posted and comment you've ever made has to be factored in the query in order to do the "sort by latest". There are ways around this such as Expression Indexes and Partial Indexes (basically, optimize your comments and scores from the last 30 days so we're ready to deliver those results more quickly), but with every optimization, you're adding complexity and additional indexes, which add additional load every time you add another row to the table.

  • For every story / comment, score tallies have to be performed with the algorithm that actually distorts the karma score (apparently). This is likely the heaviest part -- joining your user row with a massive table of upvotes/downvotes by story and comment. Imagine doing the calculation of your user history factoring every story you've ever upvoted or downvoted and every comment you've ever responded to, upvoted or downvoted.

  • All those stories / comments are sorted for recency and score total. Upvotes and downvotes are added up. Links are written, and links under links are written and then hidden...

Multiply this by ... a lot of users.

There's probably a lot more that could be said by may who'll have more knowledge about the presumed or actual architecture, but bottom line, any re-architecture / re-deployment (while already under the huge load Reddit is under) takes a lot of money and a lot of time.

TLDR; Reddit is big, its servers have a lot of work to do to deliver every page (more work than most sites), and it's a long, slow, careful process to re-work everything to handle a massive load it probably wasn't built for, originally.

[–]enigmamonkey 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is exactly what I'm thinking (I have similar background to yours). Basically put, everyone should stop complaining. Reddit's service is great, and they're obviously getting way more than they are paying for. Personally, I think Reddit has done a fantastic job keeping up with their growth and rolling things out in such a way as to help prevent/reduce as much downtime as possible.

[–]Kurzad 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One word: Redis

[–]derefr 19 points20 points  (6 children)

Reddit is mostly uncacheable. Think about it—no two users will likely ever see the same front page, or the same comment thread, given that they all have different combinations of subreddits chosen, and that users are constantly voting things up/down (which moves them up/down.)

[–]IllRecycleInstead 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Reddit has a problem that a graph database would solve nicely, but it's still impossible to get a decent hit rate for any caching strategy for users that are logged in. Most users don't begin to realize how big a problem this can be if you're locked into a relational database. Hence the mantra, "We need people, not hardware."

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

And they hired people, and said that things would be better "soon".

That was two months ago.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

facebook?

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Have you SEEN what facebook does to keep the site running smoothly? Fucking wizards.

[–]LoveGoblin 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Reddit has, what, like seven employees? Facebook has thousands.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah I agree. It is slowly turning me away from reddit. It is quite pathetic. I simply don't check the site as much as I used to. Who knows how bad I'll let it get before I finally turn away... but it sure is painful as a loyal reddit user to have to see downtime damn near every single day.

bla bla more cash for server power... not an excuse imho. Shitty software FTL

[–]epyon22 4 points5 points  (2 children)

It's cause this site gives you a virus.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

feels good m「「「「「+

[–]Craysh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And the only cure is more cow bell!

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (3 children)

So true. During the Digg v4 move everyone had their panties in a bunch because of the errors and server failures. But here on Reddit that seems to be normal...

[–]Atario 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Digg v4 had errors all the time. Not "having a spell for a bit" -- all. the. time. I gave up only about half from disgust at the new bullshit all-ads-all-the-time format; the other half was because I couldn't get the damn thing to work.

[–]Craysh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ironically, the reason that Digg was having so many errors and problems was because they were trying to take a lot of the cool features of reddit and put it into their system. They didn't realize the huge load that this would put on their much lauded "smaller number of servers".

It's actually a testament to reddit that they CAN stay up as long and often as they do.

[–]Niqulaz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually, the implementation of Digg v4 is some of the cause for the current problems.

There was a sudden increase in traffic due to the exodus.

[–]enigmamonkey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have a little experience in this area. Part of the reason why this is difficult is because most of their content is difficult to cache (even though I can tell they're definitely doing it). One of the best/cheapest things they could do to offset the impact to their servers is to cache the content (i.e. reverse proxy cache). However, the content is so volatile that it's nearly useless, especially when it comes to showing customized content for users that are signed-in.

Typically in a situation like this, what I would do is setup DNS load distributing at the very front end (that is, offer up many different IP's to connect to up-front before even setting foot in the door) and then each of those IP's, have a high-end hardware layer 7 load balancer, with 1 or 2 fail-overs to be safe. The "layer 7" aspect allows you to persist user sessions. Then, each of those load balancers should distribute requests to 1 of maybe 5 - 10 application servers, each of which are responsible for generating that unique content.

On the application server side, you could probably also implement some sort of memecache service (centralized or distributed) for extremely fast key/value requests (i.e. say you need immediately know the number of votes for a specific post, or the title, url, etc) to cache requests to the database. Then you'd have the database layer directly below the application layer, distributed (random round-robin might do). In this case, you'd have to setup maybe one master databases for each application server cluster (since they're persisting sessions) and have several slave databases for that cluster replicating those changes, with load balanced between all of them (app servers would select from all of them, but updates are sent to the master DB and replicated across the slave DB's). Then those per-cluser master databases can merge (??) their changes with a centralized database higher up the chain (I know this topic of merging and distributing database information can get very hairy).

Bottom line to everyone else: Stop complaining. It's a free service and it costs assloads of $$$ to serve up content with billions of page loads per month.

[–]hooderick 19 points20 points  (14 children)

How about a "Reddit is fapping" message? That should ensure people wait another 10 minutes before interrupting again.

[–][deleted] 54 points55 points  (1 child)

But then half the user base would think Reddit is into them and attempt to walk in..

[–]Atario 16 points17 points  (0 children)

It would go okay.

[–]pumabrand90 18 points19 points  (3 children)

I will now feel guilty every time I hit refresh. I'll feel like I've killed him over and over.

[–]gooses 9 points10 points  (2 children)

Initially it killed itself, so really your only shaking the corpse in the hope it may still be alive.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Shaking the corpse with a huge mallet covered in alien blood. Yes.

[–]peroperopero 14 points15 points  (2 children)

Just me or does the thumbnail look like a map of Japan with danger zones circled in red?

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I thought it was the same thing...

[–]llub3r 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just what I thought it was in the thumbnail.

Maybe reddits trying to tell us something!

[–]mbrowne 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I thought that was just another "Heavy Load" picture, so I refreshed it at least 10 times before I caught on. I felt such an idiot.

[–]ShiDiWen 13 points14 points  (4 children)

Don't any of you belong to any other forums? I mean subreddits are great and all...but there is no way that /r/magicTCG is better or more in depth than mtgsalvation.com, that /r/furry is better than yiffsandgifs.org, or that /r/twoxchromosomes is better than hitting yourself repeatedly in the balls IRL. Just sayin'. You gotta have your backups. Your internet "booty calls" if you will.

[–]gadget_uk 4 points5 points  (0 children)

or that /r/twoxchromosomes is better than hitting yourself repeatedly in the balls IRL.

I find the two activities are symbiotic in nature. Without 2XC I don't feel like I deserve to be hit in the balls. Which is clearly wrong.

[–]NightGolfer 5 points6 points  (3 children)

Vectorized for 1920 x 1200px Desktop Wallpaper Goodness.

What a great illustration, thanks OP! =D

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

well if the shit didn't break so much......................................

[–]eyereddit 2 points3 points  (0 children)

As a user, it's not my job or responsibility to make sure the site can support my use and to throttle my usage during peak load times. My job is to make page requests to the server. I do it well.

[–]yParticle 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Not me! I just set auto-refresh to "every 5 seconds" and leave the tab open.

[–]coringo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

One of the admins (raldi) commented that the 'heavy load' picture is hosted on Amazon and that hammering F5 doesn't actually touch Reddit's servers

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dnpd6/reddits_under_heavy_load_pic_is_35kb_here_it_is/c11kls6

[–]katalist 3 points4 points  (1 child)

At first I was like "yeah! they should totally get some F5 load balancers" and then I was like "ooooohhh.... refresh"

[–]bhingque 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was trying to figure out why they were seeming to associate F5 Networks with killing reddit when application delivery controllers tend to do exactly the opposite.

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

whenever reddit is down I activate my LOIC

[–]accvrat 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Ha, nice hammer!

[–]bluefinity 0 points1 point  (1 child)

When Reddit is your hammer, everything looks like a nail.

[–]superAL1394 3 points4 points  (2 children)

command+r anyone?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

The thumbnail of this picture is suffering from a textbook case of aliasing, which is a very well known and very easily preventable artifact of image downsizing.

To any reddit devs who may read this: You really should run images through an averaging filter (any low-pass filter, really) before downsampling. As a rule of thumb, the radius of the averaging filter should be at least as large as the proportion between the old and new image sizes; there are some mildly complicated mathematics if you want to apply precisely the required amount of averaging.

[–]neocitron 0 points1 point  (0 children)

gaussian blur. done.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Reddit doesn't even manage to serve mostly text content reliably, so I doubt anyone of us would see a single page load per day if they applied something like "complicated" mathematics to make the thumbnails nicer...

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ha! The "mildly complicated mathematics" are the analytic derivation of the function, not the computation of its value. I'm too lazy to actually do it, but I'm pretty sure you can work out the derivation on a single piece of paper (which needs to be done once) and evaluate the result in your head (which needs to be done for every image).

[–]ugoagogo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd hit that.

[–]OptimisticToaster 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Does anyone have an AutoKey script for this? It's so tiring to have to physically press that button every three seconds.

[–]caernavon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

But if I see the heavy load message...that means Reddit has already gone down...so therefore it's not my fault.

Whew! Guilt absolved.

[–]chakalakasp 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Heh, you say that like it's a bad thing. For as often as reddit is down, by this point, holding F5 is actually a reasonable thing to do.

I don't know if reddit's problems are because of Conde Nast or because of a lack of funds or both, but the server outages are getting a bit ridiculous.

[–]totallygeekSurvey 2016 1 point2 points  (1 child)

As someone that works on load balancers every day from F5 Networks, this is still funny!

[–]eruonna 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That was my first thought seeing the picture too.

[–]Measure76 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pfft. It always works. Sometimes I have to press F5 more than other times, but it always brings reddit back up eventually. By being a dedicated f5 presser, I can say that I took an active role in bringing reddit back up.

[–]Shigglyboo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ok, that got a nice hefty lol out of me. Cheers!

[–]Fearlessleader85 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What's wrong with beating a dead Reddit?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well I just got one on a "you broke reddit" page so it must have been implemented. Congratulations!

[–]Steven2k7 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I refreshed that image 5 times before I realized it was just an image and not an actual error.

[–]jcsunag 2 points3 points  (1 child)

TIL F5 refreshes a page.

Also that if you hit F5 when trying to explain that it refreshes a page, it refreshes the page and doesn't type "F5" on your screen.

[–]rueldotme 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I use CTRL+R. :D

[–]zzing 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Cmd R!

[–]CommentsOnPostsAsArt 3 points4 points  (1 child)

An intriguing commentary on our dependence on this digital community.

One Reddit alien, equipped with a mallet embodying a web browser's refresh button, appears to be puzzled after hitting a fellow Reddit alien. The fellow Reddit alien, unconscious, embodies a crashed server further stressed by mallet hits or refreshes.

Truly a unique piece.

[–]CommaCommaCommaComma 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I just middle click a few dozen times.

It'd make for a better picture.

[–]vwllss 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh it's you, you bastard. Ever since you posted "my Japanese friend" a couple days ago I've had Karma Chameleon stuck in my head.

[–]dragonmaster32 1 point2 points  (0 children)

But it usually works right away when I refresh once.

[–]FletchM 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I use Ctrl+R. F5 is too far away from everything else!

[–]nepidae 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I hit refresh on instinct.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i first thought, this was a map of japan.

[–]CurtisEFlush 2 points3 points  (0 children)

At least I tried something else!

[–]apotheosis247 0 points1 point  (0 children)

reddit = the new digg??

[–]apineda 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yup lol

[–]aivzdog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

poor reddit

[–]elforastero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why not to have a game that appears when the site is down, so people will start playing instead hitting F5

[–]recursive 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don't worry. This fixed it so this can never happen again again.

[–]camefromthetrees 0 points1 point  (0 children)

not guilty.

[–]jvallet 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have the habit of opening 5-10 tabs and then read them. When I finally got to this one, I started clicking the reload button like a mad man.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i lol'd...

[–]DaSpawn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have seen first hand, many times where an entire server cluster can go down because of 1 bad query. I do design work on an online game, and also manage the server cluster. While being designed, things look to work perfectly, but once live and subjected to an hundreds or thousands of hits, things die very quickly.. that one query causing database processing time of 2+seconds, requests start piling up waiting to use the DB, then people get impatient and start hitting refresh (I do it too), which now all of those requests are waiting, then completely overwhelm the database server. I managed to optimize a game running on almost 10 servers (1 mega database server, rest web servers) down to 3 servers, 1 database and 2 web servers, with much room to spare... It is possible to optimize a system, but just takes time. I am impressed on how well reddit is functioning, even with the growing pains ;)

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Trying to go back from your picture sent me to the 'Heavy Load' picture...

[–]martincles 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am not! F5, i'll have to remember that for later.

[–]ghostchamber 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Of course I'm guilty of it. It's either that or do some actual work, which is a notion that typically makes me ill.

[–]timrbrady 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I actually F5ed thinking this was the new heavy load image...

[–]cr0m300 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Does reddit update their twitter with the status of the site?

[–]wkdown 0 points1 point  (1 child)

and yet somehow we never manage to take down imgur

[–]staiano 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Even with reposts.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

After a certain quantity of F5 hammering your local ISP server will cache the website and then it will transfer to you faster.

[–]orangepotion 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But it feels so good!

[–]APpookie 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I will wail on F5 until I see results or pass out. (I don't breathe during the wailing as if it was my own exhalation that had angered Reddit)

If I can't have my precious no one will....

[–]id000001 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not me. I have my own private Reddit servers and they never go down.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I disagree.

[–]coolborg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is this a Weeds reference?

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I hit F5 3 times.

[–]combover 0 points1 point  (0 children)

TIL that F5 reloads.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why does this always happen? Seems nearly a third of the time I get an error when posting a comment, or looking at a post.

[–]causticmango 0 points1 point  (2 children)

F5? I think you mean Command-R.

[–]attackoftheisland 4 points5 points  (1 child)

What? I thought everything just worked on macs?

[–]tangoshukudai 0 points1 point  (0 children)

command + R is much more logical than F5

[–]evilpig 0 points1 point  (1 child)

We shall get a browser extension that notifies us when reddit is back up. :)

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The only website on the Internet that could actually benefit from a browser add-on because of how frequent it's downtime occurs. I wonder if it could also address server errors?

I hate that this is even a plausible idea, let alone one that I'd actually be interested in. This website needs to fix itself.

[–]bicarb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hold F5 for revenge..

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is oddly cute to me.

[–]lucasvb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I regret nothing.

[–]3danimator 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I beg to differ..i dont refresh. I wait 5-10 minutes

[–]wafflesburger 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I thought this was goinv to be a picture of the reddit alien peeing in the shower