3 ms·

No offense taken, I don’t work on the product side of things there. Also, with the caveat that I don’t know enough about the implementation details of the prod

No offense taken, I don’t work on the product side of things there. Also, with the caveat that I don’t know enough about the implementation details of the product at Reddit: I’d argue that Reddit’s workload is more write heavy that Wikipedia’s workload, which makes caching and scaling a bit harder for Reddit, relatively speaking.

majewsky 7y ago
OTOH, shouldn't it be easier to scale Reddit horizontally by sharding the subreddits into separate DBs?
- dTal 7y ago
  Certainly not trivially - the subreddits are not wholly independent entities. User accounts are shared between them, for instance, and every post a user makes is (searchably) linked to their account, regardless of which subreddit they posted it in. Users can also send each other private messages, and this does not take place in the context of any particular subreddit.
  - adrusi 7y ago
    Not to mention that a huge portion of reddit traffic goes to aggregation pages like users' frontpages, /r/all, and too a lesser extent multireddits.
Nemo_bis 7y ago
That could be true, but do you have some numbers? Wikimedia wikis are in the order of a few hundreds edits per minute, around a thousand and sometimes more. https://tools.wmflabs.org/wmcounter/ https://tools.wmflabs.org/wmcounter/ https://wikipulse.herokuapp.com/ https://wikipulse.herokuapp.com/
- adventured 7y ago
  To add the Reddit figures to the discussion. There are something like ~2,100-2,200 comments posted to Reddit per minute on average across a year at this point (around or slightly over three million comments per day). That's not the peak minute figure of course, which is no doubt several times higher.
  - Nemo_bis 7y ago
    So it's actually comparable I'd say, in terms of frequency. In terms of how much "writing" this actually means, it varies: an edit to a large article, even if it's just a comma, requires several seconds of parsing to produce the wikitext, a lot of events propagated in various places etc.

majewsky 7y ago

OTOH, shouldn't it be easier to scale Reddit horizontally by sharding the subreddits into separate DBs?

dTal 7y ago
Certainly not trivially - the subreddits are not wholly independent entities. User accounts are shared between them, for instance, and every post a user makes is (searchably) linked to their account, regardless of which subreddit they posted it in. Users can also send each other private messages, and this does not take place in the context of any particular subreddit.
- adrusi 7y ago
  Not to mention that a huge portion of reddit traffic goes to aggregation pages like users' frontpages, /r/all, and too a lesser extent multireddits.

Nemo_bis 7y ago

That could be true, but do you have some numbers? Wikimedia wikis are in the order of a few hundreds edits per minute, around a thousand and sometimes more. https://tools.wmflabs.org/wmcounter/ https://tools.wmflabs.org/wmcounter/ https://wikipulse.herokuapp.com/ https://wikipulse.herokuapp.com/

adventured 7y ago
To add the Reddit figures to the discussion. There are something like ~2,100-2,200 comments posted to Reddit per minute on average across a year at this point (around or slightly over three million comments per day). That's not the peak minute figure of course, which is no doubt several times higher.
- Nemo_bis 7y ago
  So it's actually comparable I'd say, in terms of frequency. In terms of how much "writing" this actually means, it varies: an edit to a large article, even if it's just a comma, requires several seconds of parsing to produce the wikitext, a lot of events propagated in various places etc.