I’m a backend server programmer, and although I have never worked on reddit I can imagine the conversation a few years back:
Dev A: How do we implement private? Should each post have a private flag or do we join on the subreddit to get it?
Dev B: that join might be heavy for the front page since we might have several different subreddits, a flag in each post is faster.
Dev A: But that means that whenever a subreddit goes private we need to flag all of the posts there
Dev B: yeah, but that doesn’t happen often, the front page gets accessed millions of times, most subreddits never change status, especially larger ones.
Dev A: I guess you’re right, even a large subreddit will be done in minutes, what are the odds of several large subreddits going private at the same time?
The funniest thing about this is that means that the subreddits in question could keep flipping the switch back and forth and with each change cause outages.
I’m a backend server programmer, and although I have never worked on reddit I can imagine the conversation a few years back:
Dev A: How do we implement private? Should each post have a private flag or do we join on the subreddit to get it?
Dev B: that join might be heavy for the front page since we might have several different subreddits, a flag in each post is faster.
Dev A: But that means that whenever a subreddit goes private we need to flag all of the posts there
Dev B: yeah, but that doesn’t happen often, the front page gets accessed millions of times, most subreddits never change status, especially larger ones.
Dev A: I guess you’re right, even a large subreddit will be done in minutes, what are the odds of several large subreddits going private at the same time?
The funniest thing about this is that means that the subreddits in question could keep flipping the switch back and forth and with each change cause outages.
back and forth, forever…
That’s r/talesfromtechsupport material lol.