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The toothpaste is out of the tube - notifications are going to be scrutinized more in the future, from this point on. I got the email. And about 20+ responses
by tony 4y ago
The toothpaste is out of the tube - notifications are going to be scrutinized more in the future, from this point on.
I got the email. And about 20+ responses to that email.
Every person who replies to that issue triggers another 400k emails. Personally, my email client is crashing.
EpicGames, as a GitHub org is an outlier, it's basically an SSO for Unreal Engine. I forgot I was even a member of it.
- seba_dos1 4y agoIt must be hard for GitHub servers, but which e-mail client is crashing from about 100 short, text-only messages received in an hour?
- tony 4y agoIrrelevant to the topic.
- pwython 4y agoOutlook 2003?
- blibble 4y agomy outlook 365 (or whatever it's called this week) at work can barely handle moving 100 without locking up
- mike256 4y agoMost probably Outlook! Imho the worst e-mail client on earth with a massive base of absolutely blind fanboys in almost every company...
- frosted-flakes 4y agoWhich Outlook? There are several different email clients with that name.
- nabakin 4y agoI doubt it but I wonder if OP is lying and didn't realize there would only be a hundred or two emails
- tony 4y agoCan you restate.
- Kelteseth 4y agoFor me, it is Thunderbird, but only because Windows Defender scans all incoming emails AFAIK.
- kaetemi 4y agoIt's an effective setup to make people feel included or part of Epic in some way. (Adding everyone who wants access to the organisation.)
- cmckn 4y agoThere was a thundering herd e-mail at Amazon about 10 years ago that I’ve heard stories about. It went on for days. There’s a funny internal talk with lots of data about it, maybe it’s on YouTube by now…
- spike021 4y agoSomething similar happened at Cisco something like maybe 5 years ago? Someone sent the Bay Area employees or whatever list (probably at least some tens of thousands of employees) an ask for a cook/chef they could hire to make meals for their family, IIRC. I think the reply-all's happened all week.
- kenrose 4y agoMS in 2005 as well.
- Sirened 4y agoAnd Apple in 1991 [1]. It's a very fun story actually, good read if you're in the business of writing "reliable" or "recoverable" software (aka pretty much everyone). A bad design choice in sendmail caused a cascading explosion of emails. I also highly recommend reading the rest of the book (?), the Unix Hater's Handbook is a wonderful bit of history and discussion of the design issues of the NIXs we all know and love/hate today. [1] https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf page 85
- idontpost 4y ago"Bad design choice" described basically every design choice involved in email.
- rstupek 4y agoCompaq in the mid 90s on banyan vines a friend leaving the company sent a company wide email listing his house. It wasn't supposed to be possible to email *
- nimbius 4y agofriendly reminder: 400k is an apertif for a competently configured production postfix server. its about 14 seconds of mail, and about 8 seconds optimized at hw and filesystem level. the real issue here is shitty projects from shitty companies.
- emilyst 4y agooh.
- kaetemi 4y agoA lot of developers seem to underestimate how fast well-written software can process things...
- chupasaurus 4y agoYep, the mail bodies would be cached out while the rest is just the addresses in queues.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wonderbore 4y agoYes but that’s on top of what GitHub is already sending, plus it must be multiplied by the number of comments left on top of that. It feels like 35 straight minutes of 100% usage isn’t great on any system. It presumably sent 61 million emails.
- cortesoft 4y ago> Yes but that’s on top of what GitHub is already sending When you send at the volume someone like GitHub sends, you will always see peaks and valleys in your sending patterns that are much larger than 400k. It might cause an issue if they were already under peak load, but even then it would just take a bit longer.
- EugeneOZ 4y agoGitHub can afford more than one computer to send their emails.
- bmlzootown 4y agoI'm up to about 156 replies between two emails now. My phone and smart watch were buzzing like crazy earlier for each notification.
- hamburglar 4y agoYeah I’m sure they’ll institute some kind of control to make this sort of thing harder, but honestly I’ve never understood why people get so worked up about this sort of thing. It makes me chuckle. The person looks like a dummy or a shit-stirrer and a lot of people have to delete HUNDREDS (oh my) of messages and have LITERAL MINUTES of their time wasted. The megacorp I work for wastes more of my time with silly self-congratulatory org-wide emails about business deals and fake benefits like seminars on retirement planning for dummies. I love me a good bedlam drama. One of the commenters on the PR had the best take: “I just wasted 2 minutes of my life I'll never get back.” The ones with the scorched earth PUNISH HIM attitude need to chill the hell out.
- byecomputer 4y ago> The ones with the scorched earth PUNISH HIM attitude need to chill the hell out. Doesn't that just add to the comedy?
- sureglymop 4y agoYeah. Also their real names and them being immature and getting angry also went out to 400k people and is now effectively part of history. That's probably even worse than being the kid who did this, what if a future employer comes across this?
- School-Cotton 4y agoThere’s no real way to explain why it’s annoying. You just have to accept that other people have different personalities from yours.
- ta8903 4y ago>You just have to accept that other people have different personalities from yours. Yeah, being drama queens.
- hamburglar 4y agoAnd those personalities want to severely punish someone over a minor transgression. Different strokes for different folks, I guess you could say.
- wolverine876 4y ago> I got the email. And about 20+ responses to that email. > Every person who replies to that issue triggers another 400k emails. Personally, my email client is crashing. Your email client only received 20 messages; why is it crashing? The very long To: header?
- idontpost 4y agoDrunk Microsoft programmer who developed Outlook
- pavo-etc 4y agoAttempted to reach the Ballmer peak but went too far
- yardstick 4y agoWhy would it be a very long To header? It’s not like the email headers include all 400k emails in one go. That would be a massive privacy breach, and people here would be making a lot more noise about such a large email database being leaked.
- wolverine876 4y agoI agree, but couldn't think of another explanation related to that email.
- tony 4y agoIt's a personal testimony. Immaterial to the main point of the post.
- soylentgraham 4y ago> notifications are going to be scrutinized more in the future, from this point on. This already happened with github & epic & unreal when it first did this organisation setup. So, given no solution appeared after exact same incident, I wouldn't hold my breath
- sph 4y agoYour email client is crashing because it can't handle a hundred messages in an hour, that's a little less than 2 messages per minute? Throw that thing in the bin. A human printing emails and placing them on your desk could handle that workload.