I mean, doesn't feel like it's working well - fwiw. The number of times i have seen reddit is down pages, ranging from maintenance, to oopsies, to slow loads and failed requests... i just can't count, they seem part of the normal reddit flow.
They're better now then they were ages ago, but it still happens. Combine that with slow load times, etcetc.
Now, don't get me wrong they're likely doing better than i could - it's a very difficult problem to solve. But, something must be fundamentally wrong if a site who's growth has been steady and not "overnight", it just seems like it's always been very very slow. By overnight i just mean, it's growth has appeared predictable; Unlike the poor sites that get HN/Reddit hug of death.
edit: Not sure why i was downvoted, but i'll elaborate:
From a user perspective, Google never goes down. It's a big event when that happens. I've never seen Amazon down (again, personally!). I've never seen most of the big players down. Yet i've seen Reddit down more times than i can count. It's a meme on the site.
Regardless of how difficult the problem domain is, the end user doesn't care. All i'm saying is that the end user experience is not good enough, in my opinion. I don't think that is an unfair statement.
So if this caching is what is powering the current state of things, what can be done better? From a technical perspective, is this the best that can be achieved? I surely hope not. Would you argue it's the best we can hope for?
Anecdotally, I also get way more errors/dropped connections/random slowness on Reddit than on any of the other massive sites. Plus the mobile site is beyond terrible, unusable on my phone.
I'm sure it's not an easy problem to solve, but they should be able to afford some hosting with all the reddit gold that seems to get thrown around.
They're better now then they were ages ago, but it still happens. Combine that with slow load times, etcetc.
Now, don't get me wrong they're likely doing better than i could - it's a very difficult problem to solve. But, something must be fundamentally wrong if a site who's growth has been steady and not "overnight", it just seems like it's always been very very slow. By overnight i just mean, it's growth has appeared predictable; Unlike the poor sites that get HN/Reddit hug of death.
edit: Not sure why i was downvoted, but i'll elaborate:
From a user perspective, Google never goes down. It's a big event when that happens. I've never seen Amazon down (again, personally!). I've never seen most of the big players down. Yet i've seen Reddit down more times than i can count. It's a meme on the site.
Regardless of how difficult the problem domain is, the end user doesn't care. All i'm saying is that the end user experience is not good enough, in my opinion. I don't think that is an unfair statement.
So if this caching is what is powering the current state of things, what can be done better? From a technical perspective, is this the best that can be achieved? I surely hope not. Would you argue it's the best we can hope for?