Here's roughly the latest architecture from QCon 2017 [1][2]. Overall it's because of a bloated React frontend even though there's little to no reactivity on mo

Here's roughly the latest architecture from QCon 2017 [1][2]. Overall it's because of a bloated React frontend even though there's little to no reactivity on most pages. It could all be replaced with some standard JS and CSS animations. Too many API calls pulling too much data for what's being shown and firing serially as components are loaded instead of getting it in batches for the entire page. The site lacks basic optimizations like virtual scrolling to keep the browser from crashing after a few pages of content. There are also entire npm packages being pulled in instead of any tree-shaking, or browser-specific polyfills. The backend is cached by cassandra even though content is highly static and DB servers are fast enough for their denormalized and partitioned schemas. It's basically just a few tables used as key/value for each entity type represented on the site. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUcO7n4hek4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUcO7n4hek4 2. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/reddit-architecture-evolution/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/reddit-architecture-evol...