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This reads as extremely self-congratulatory. A "billion requests per month" is only a few hundred requests per second, which is both trivial and not a "DDOS." A

This reads as extremely self-congratulatory. A "billion requests per month" is only a few hundred requests per second, which is both trivial and not a "DDOS." Also, their site is behind a CDN (Cloudflare), so I'm extra confused on how they think they did something notable from a performance perspective here. For example, there's no reasonable world where that 200 MB blob is not cached and served over CDN. I can't imagine someone would be so proud that their application server isn't reading 200 MB from disk and copying those bytes to the client on every download; it's just so obviously poor design.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago
If the 200MB files they are referring to are the TablePlus client side app downloads (183MB for windows) at https://tableplus.com/download https://tableplus.com/download The files are indeed cached by CF: # curl -v https://files.tableplus.com/windows/5.9.2/TablePlusSetup.exec > /dev/null ... < cache-control: max-age=691200 < cf-cache-status: HIT < age: 2980
- hartator 3y ago
  So, there are serving virtually zero bits from their servers.
  - helsinkiandrew 3y ago
    To be fair that was only one of the files they mentioned - the rest could be going to their server on every hit.
- thinkingemote 3y ago
  I thought cloudfare would only cache web files like html and images and not actual files? This caused problems with some of their users as seen previously on HN Or is that only with the free tier?
tgv 3y ago
It's rarely a few hundred per second. Request density is nor uniform over time. It can regularly reach 20x the average.
- eru 3y ago
  20x of a few hundred a second is still only a few thousand a second.
mondomondo 3y ago
But typically this take would be assumed by a FAANG company to require over a thousand developers? Like how can claim it’s self congratulatory when huge companies regularly can’t do this?
- darby_eight 3y ago
  [dead]
- boredpudding 3y ago
  Because it's the company with a thousand developers (Cloudflare) who's dealing with this.
  - rvnx 3y ago
    Exactly, the same way that "the cloud" is just someone else computer and responsibility.
  - conductr 3y ago
    I think the self congratulatory tone is just them saying if you design things simply you can do a lot (load) with a lot less (people/complexity) and still have an app that’s resilient (ignore minor ddos issues). It’s encouraging or reminding people that this style of architecture, which was once prevalent, is still an option and is still rather legit. Or, that’s how I read it however I also am biased as I prefer this method of development too. I think what’s missing in the article is, who are they and who is the audience. As in, some acknowledge that most things are not ever going to see mass scale usage and don’t need to be developed to the specs of a faang
    - maxk42 3y ago
      Except that it wasn't their architecture which allowed them to weather this storm: it's Cloudflare's. And the storm is a whopping 1.85 requests per second, all coming from Europe which means this isn't even a DDoS to begin with.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

If the 200MB files they are referring to are the TablePlus client side app downloads (183MB for windows) at https://tableplus.com/download https://tableplus.com/download The files are indeed cached by CF: # curl -v https://files.tableplus.com/windows/5.9.2/TablePlusSetup.exec > /dev/null ... < cache-control: max-age=691200 < cf-cache-status: HIT < age: 2980

hartator 3y ago
So, there are serving virtually zero bits from their servers.
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago
  To be fair that was only one of the files they mentioned - the rest could be going to their server on every hit.
thinkingemote 3y ago
I thought cloudfare would only cache web files like html and images and not actual files? This caused problems with some of their users as seen previously on HN Or is that only with the free tier?

tgv 3y ago

It's rarely a few hundred per second. Request density is nor uniform over time. It can regularly reach 20x the average.

eru 3y ago
20x of a few hundred a second is still only a few thousand a second.

mondomondo 3y ago

But typically this take would be assumed by a FAANG company to require over a thousand developers? Like how can claim it’s self congratulatory when huge companies regularly can’t do this?

darby_eight 3y ago
[dead]
boredpudding 3y ago
Because it's the company with a thousand developers (Cloudflare) who's dealing with this.
- rvnx 3y ago
  Exactly, the same way that "the cloud" is just someone else computer and responsibility.
- conductr 3y ago
  I think the self congratulatory tone is just them saying if you design things simply you can do a lot (load) with a lot less (people/complexity) and still have an app that’s resilient (ignore minor ddos issues). It’s encouraging or reminding people that this style of architecture, which was once prevalent, is still an option and is still rather legit. Or, that’s how I read it however I also am biased as I prefer this method of development too. I think what’s missing in the article is, who are they and who is the audience. As in, some acknowledge that most things are not ever going to see mass scale usage and don’t need to be developed to the specs of a faang
  - maxk42 3y ago
    Except that it wasn't their architecture which allowed them to weather this storm: it's Cloudflare's. And the storm is a whopping 1.85 requests per second, all coming from Europe which means this isn't even a DDoS to begin with.