5 ms·

Is it just me or has guthub's performance and reliability been getting progressively worse over the past month or two? Even putting this issue aside, and the ou

Is it just me or has guthub's performance and reliability been getting progressively worse over the past month or two? Even putting this issue aside, and the outages, pushing to a private repo takes _minutes_ now, and file lists in the web interface often don't load without a page refresh.

windsurfer 16y ago
At the price and size of Linode instances, it's cheaper and I feel better knowing I'm in control when I run Redmine+Gitosis. When I had my github account and something went wrong, I couldn't just ssh in and fix it. All I could do is wait. Now, for some people, I can see how waiting is an easier solution. I personally just don't like it. (of course, this is reffering to private repos. public repos are still king on github)
- SpiralLab 16y ago
  A major selling point of Git is the distributed part. You are allowed (even encouraged) to have more than one "source of truth". For ~7$/mo (including admin. and cheaper than Linode), GitHub is just another place to have a hosted version of your repo, with a nice UI and social features. Shit happens, servers go down, that's why you also have a remote repo hosted on Linode, and X, and Y too.
  - saurik 16y ago
    This is an interesting theory, but it isn't how git's client actually works. If the repository exported a list of "mirrors" to the client that it then stored and was willing to use, that would be awesome, but otherwise you have a million people out there who are now just getting error messages when they do "git pull" and the only fix is for them to go back to your web page and try to get information on what is happening and where else they can switch their origin. Meanwhile, if you do your own hosting you can just update your DNS to point to another box and no one is the wiser. They key problem, frankly, is that GitHub conflates two entirely unrelated things: a nice UI and social features, and a hosted version of your repo. I love the idea of outsourcing a nice UI and having cool social features, and /maybe/ to make those features work they need to have a mirror of my repository (I'm not convinced), but when people go to pull it the URL listed should be the actual upstream "I own the DNS on this and feel I can make this stable in the long term", not the GitHub mirror.
    - SpiralLab 16y ago
      This is a straw man argument. The question isn't whether Git could be more intuitive/user-friendly (Hint: It should be, in fact I bet my company on it [see my profile]), or whether it is more secure/cheap to host your own repo. If you have a million people `pull`ing from your repo, of course you should have be hosting your own public access point. But, in 80% of cases, people can't be bothered to figure out how to set up Gitosis, pay for slices, mess with DNS, etc. just to host a repo. To put it another way, see: Heroku vs. EC2
      - saurik 16y ago
        This comment is totally unrelated and is itself a strawman. Yes, it is easier to use GitHub: I will not argue that fact. However, using GitHub will cause people to be pulling from GitHub, and GitHub may go down. This is a tradeoff, and is one people use a lot: you use a shared platform and give up control of the URL to get easier outsourced hosting. But to argue that git's decentralization solves that problem is disingenuous: it means that people could theoretically still pull your repository, but only after finding out what that fallback URL is and manually resetting their origin, which 90% of git users don't even know how to do. Meanwhile, many people are willing to spend the five minutes it takes to learn how to run their own server and want to avoid this tradeoff by hosting their own stuff on their own hostnames so they can publish stable URLs, but /can't/, because they like GitHub's social features, none of which (due to the aforementioned distributed features, humorously) actually require GitHub to be the canonical repository URL: if you want to use GitHub, you are going to have people cloning and pulling your GitHub mirror (or even worse: adding your GitHub mirror as a submodule) and when it goes down they are going to get errors, and you will have no control over it. That sucks.
        wfarr 16y ago
        Web services go down. It happens. You make the choice to use them anyway. In this case, Github is very responsive about outages and clearly strives to eliminate or reduce them as much as possible.
  - windsurfer 16y ago
    I'm a student, and I make a new git repo for each assignment or class. Github would become extremely expensive if I was to do this. And my model for working on git projects is not distributed. We use a centralized model (which is totally viable and one of the many uses) instead of pull requests and branches. On small projects, I find this faster and easier for people to use. Yes, I have backups, but when my centralized repo goes down, it's annoying to tell people to start pushing and pulling to a USB drive. Workflow is the issue, not losing work.
    - bjg 16y ago
      You mentioned Github would be prohibitively expensive if you were to use it for all of your school assignments? Github actually has a program where if you tell them you are a student/professor you can get free private repo's.
      - windsurfer 16y ago
        I didn't know that, thanks! Free is always nice :)
  - jamesbritt 16y ago
    "GitHub is just another place to have a hosted version of your repo, with a nice UI and social features." The main point of Github is the social aspect; git just makes that easier. They were other public git hosts before, but they didn't get the traction of GitHub because they didn't offer the same magic as The Place to share code. It's git hub for a reason.
- ChuckN 16y ago
  If you have that much time on your hands, just use github as your main repository source and Redmine+Gitosis as a secondary? Everybody with a git clone has a full copy of everything.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  It's amazing to me that you feel more confident in your own abilities to keep a server running than GitHub... you must be a really great sysadmin! The GitHub folks are pretty hardcore! I, for one, am a positively mediocre sysadmin. And the amount of time I have to spend waiting for GitHub to fix bugs is almost certainly far, far, FAR less than the amount of time I'd spend scrambling (but not waiting!) to fix my own. This is also how I feel about Heroku. For whatever reason, I prefer the helplessness I feel while waiting for them to fix stuff to the helplessness I feel when I'm in "OH SHIT MY SERVER IS DOWN AND I DIDN'T EVEN DO ANYTHING AND WHY IS THE DATABASE NOT RESPONDING IT RESPONDS WHEN I QUERY IT MANUALLY AAAUUGGHHH!!!" mode. Although I do try to keep myself sharp by doing things by hand in other areas of my engineering activities.
  - Luyt 16y ago
    It's not that hard to install a source control server, whether it's git, svn or mercurial.
    - hermanthegerman 16y ago
      Yes, I can confirm that it's surprisingly easy to run git with gitosis over ssh on your own server for a few dollars. Takes a couple of minutes to setup. And of course you can make it public and you can share it with other people with keys.
  - jshen 16y ago
    The beauty os a dvcs is that I have a full copy on my machine as well. But seriously, if you use git over ssh there is no sys admin work other than running apt-get upgrade
    - roel_v 16y ago
      Maybe for a few months. When you run a server for 2 or 3 years the distro goes out of support, software upgrades are getting behind, before you know it you are compiling patches from source, ... I've done this several times over the last 5 years and am now finally moving everything to specialized hosting services. Just hosting a web site, photo repo, mail and svn on a machine (vps) is enough to make it a serious hassle Moving all those to specialized services costs the same, is less work and more reliable.
guywithabike 16y ago
It's just you. My team uses dozens of private repos hundreds of times a day and everything's been smooth for the past few months, aside from the disruptions noted on their status blog.
- andrewljohnson 16y ago
  It's not _just_ him. Right now, it's me too.
jamesbritt 16y ago
I have two repos living in "Repository temporarily unavailable" status for several days now. I understand that shit happens, but what's really frustration is inquiry about what can or will be done about it and getting no response. Do I wait? Do I just move stuff to my own server? Go back to Gitorious? It's not that I can't keep working, but the main reason I use Github is to make my OSS projects available. For other things I run my own server and my own git host. Having a project unavailable to people for days, when I'm trying to get bug fixes and such out, is not so good.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  Two questions: 1) did you file a support ticket? that seems like the sort of thing they'd be serious about fixing, and 2) do you have a paid account? In some sense, it doesn't matter, OSS developers are important to their mission too, but... well, I'm curious because I have a paid account and if you do too then that makes me more afraid for myself.
  - jamesbritt 16y ago
    Yes and yes ($7/mo). I just now got some mail from github, and need to take a look at some stuff to sort things out. So it's being looked into.
- sreitshamer 16y ago
  Responding is key. I believe the easiest way to build a successful business (software and/or service business anyway) is to respond promptly. Even if you don't have an answer yet. If you do, your customers will stick with you through almost anything.
oomkiller 16y ago
I haven't had any trouble, but I have seen more interruptions happening recently. I relate it to growth, because as you grow, these things sometimes happen more often; "growing pains" if you will. Overall I am happy with Github, and their downtime has not cost me any time or money.

windsurfer 16y ago

At the price and size of Linode instances, it's cheaper and I feel better knowing I'm in control when I run Redmine+Gitosis. When I had my github account and something went wrong, I couldn't just ssh in and fix it. All I could do is wait. Now, for some people, I can see how waiting is an easier solution. I personally just don't like it. (of course, this is reffering to private repos. public repos are still king on github)

SpiralLab 16y ago
A major selling point of Git is the distributed part. You are allowed (even encouraged) to have more than one "source of truth". For ~7$/mo (including admin. and cheaper than Linode), GitHub is just another place to have a hosted version of your repo, with a nice UI and social features. Shit happens, servers go down, that's why you also have a remote repo hosted on Linode, and X, and Y too.
- saurik 16y ago
  This is an interesting theory, but it isn't how git's client actually works. If the repository exported a list of "mirrors" to the client that it then stored and was willing to use, that would be awesome, but otherwise you have a million people out there who are now just getting error messages when they do "git pull" and the only fix is for them to go back to your web page and try to get information on what is happening and where else they can switch their origin. Meanwhile, if you do your own hosting you can just update your DNS to point to another box and no one is the wiser. They key problem, frankly, is that GitHub conflates two entirely unrelated things: a nice UI and social features, and a hosted version of your repo. I love the idea of outsourcing a nice UI and having cool social features, and /maybe/ to make those features work they need to have a mirror of my repository (I'm not convinced), but when people go to pull it the URL listed should be the actual upstream "I own the DNS on this and feel I can make this stable in the long term", not the GitHub mirror.
  - SpiralLab 16y ago
    This is a straw man argument. The question isn't whether Git could be more intuitive/user-friendly (Hint: It should be, in fact I bet my company on it [see my profile]), or whether it is more secure/cheap to host your own repo. If you have a million people `pull`ing from your repo, of course you should have be hosting your own public access point. But, in 80% of cases, people can't be bothered to figure out how to set up Gitosis, pay for slices, mess with DNS, etc. just to host a repo. To put it another way, see: Heroku vs. EC2
    - saurik 16y ago
      This comment is totally unrelated and is itself a strawman. Yes, it is easier to use GitHub: I will not argue that fact. However, using GitHub will cause people to be pulling from GitHub, and GitHub may go down. This is a tradeoff, and is one people use a lot: you use a shared platform and give up control of the URL to get easier outsourced hosting. But to argue that git's decentralization solves that problem is disingenuous: it means that people could theoretically still pull your repository, but only after finding out what that fallback URL is and manually resetting their origin, which 90% of git users don't even know how to do. Meanwhile, many people are willing to spend the five minutes it takes to learn how to run their own server and want to avoid this tradeoff by hosting their own stuff on their own hostnames so they can publish stable URLs, but /can't/, because they like GitHub's social features, none of which (due to the aforementioned distributed features, humorously) actually require GitHub to be the canonical repository URL: if you want to use GitHub, you are going to have people cloning and pulling your GitHub mirror (or even worse: adding your GitHub mirror as a submodule) and when it goes down they are going to get errors, and you will have no control over it. That sucks.
      - wfarr 16y ago
        Web services go down. It happens. You make the choice to use them anyway. In this case, Github is very responsive about outages and clearly strives to eliminate or reduce them as much as possible.
- windsurfer 16y ago
  I'm a student, and I make a new git repo for each assignment or class. Github would become extremely expensive if I was to do this. And my model for working on git projects is not distributed. We use a centralized model (which is totally viable and one of the many uses) instead of pull requests and branches. On small projects, I find this faster and easier for people to use. Yes, I have backups, but when my centralized repo goes down, it's annoying to tell people to start pushing and pulling to a USB drive. Workflow is the issue, not losing work.
  - bjg 16y ago
    You mentioned Github would be prohibitively expensive if you were to use it for all of your school assignments? Github actually has a program where if you tell them you are a student/professor you can get free private repo's.
    - windsurfer 16y ago
      I didn't know that, thanks! Free is always nice :)
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  "GitHub is just another place to have a hosted version of your repo, with a nice UI and social features." The main point of Github is the social aspect; git just makes that easier. They were other public git hosts before, but they didn't get the traction of GitHub because they didn't offer the same magic as The Place to share code. It's git hub for a reason.
ChuckN 16y ago
If you have that much time on your hands, just use github as your main repository source and Redmine+Gitosis as a secondary? Everybody with a git clone has a full copy of everything.
erikpukinskis 16y ago
It's amazing to me that you feel more confident in your own abilities to keep a server running than GitHub... you must be a really great sysadmin! The GitHub folks are pretty hardcore! I, for one, am a positively mediocre sysadmin. And the amount of time I have to spend waiting for GitHub to fix bugs is almost certainly far, far, FAR less than the amount of time I'd spend scrambling (but not waiting!) to fix my own. This is also how I feel about Heroku. For whatever reason, I prefer the helplessness I feel while waiting for them to fix stuff to the helplessness I feel when I'm in "OH SHIT MY SERVER IS DOWN AND I DIDN'T EVEN DO ANYTHING AND WHY IS THE DATABASE NOT RESPONDING IT RESPONDS WHEN I QUERY IT MANUALLY AAAUUGGHHH!!!" mode. Although I do try to keep myself sharp by doing things by hand in other areas of my engineering activities.
- Luyt 16y ago
  It's not that hard to install a source control server, whether it's git, svn or mercurial.
  - hermanthegerman 16y ago
    Yes, I can confirm that it's surprisingly easy to run git with gitosis over ssh on your own server for a few dollars. Takes a couple of minutes to setup. And of course you can make it public and you can share it with other people with keys.
- jshen 16y ago
  The beauty os a dvcs is that I have a full copy on my machine as well. But seriously, if you use git over ssh there is no sys admin work other than running apt-get upgrade
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Maybe for a few months. When you run a server for 2 or 3 years the distro goes out of support, software upgrades are getting behind, before you know it you are compiling patches from source, ... I've done this several times over the last 5 years and am now finally moving everything to specialized hosting services. Just hosting a web site, photo repo, mail and svn on a machine (vps) is enough to make it a serious hassle Moving all those to specialized services costs the same, is less work and more reliable.

guywithabike 16y ago

It's just you. My team uses dozens of private repos hundreds of times a day and everything's been smooth for the past few months, aside from the disruptions noted on their status blog.

andrewljohnson 16y ago
It's not _just_ him. Right now, it's me too.

jamesbritt 16y ago

I have two repos living in "Repository temporarily unavailable" status for several days now. I understand that shit happens, but what's really frustration is inquiry about what can or will be done about it and getting no response. Do I wait? Do I just move stuff to my own server? Go back to Gitorious? It's not that I can't keep working, but the main reason I use Github is to make my OSS projects available. For other things I run my own server and my own git host. Having a project unavailable to people for days, when I'm trying to get bug fixes and such out, is not so good.

erikpukinskis 16y ago
Two questions: 1) did you file a support ticket? that seems like the sort of thing they'd be serious about fixing, and 2) do you have a paid account? In some sense, it doesn't matter, OSS developers are important to their mission too, but... well, I'm curious because I have a paid account and if you do too then that makes me more afraid for myself.
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  Yes and yes ($7/mo). I just now got some mail from github, and need to take a look at some stuff to sort things out. So it's being looked into.
sreitshamer 16y ago
Responding is key. I believe the easiest way to build a successful business (software and/or service business anyway) is to respond promptly. Even if you don't have an answer yet. If you do, your customers will stick with you through almost anything.

oomkiller 16y ago

I haven't had any trouble, but I have seen more interruptions happening recently. I relate it to growth, because as you grow, these things sometimes happen more often; "growing pains" if you will. Overall I am happy with Github, and their downtime has not cost me any time or money.