I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site's servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn't know why, exactly.

This isn't the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.

E: Many people have replied comparing this to the Reddit "hug of death" or "The Slashdot effect". This is not the same at all. Those are legitimate site visits from humans that happen over the course of several hours. This is the result of several thousand servers all automatically fetching the same image simultaneously , and without any human involvement, and potentially next to zero human traffic to the site, which is why I compared it to a botnet or DDOS attack.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah I think a lot of us share this experience. All the stuff we are tought in our educations about clean code and architecture... Once we come out and work, management don't want that stuff if it takes extra time. They want features shipped as soon as possible, and every meeting is about "how fast can you do this feature".

And now of course embracing AI since it's so fast. When things break, engineers will have to figure out the problem when the entire system is down, not management. :)

And then they can have a post mortem where they say that engineering must have better routines...lol.

I no longer work in tech but I quit at the top I think, before Ai was a requirement. And when consulting salaries was still good. Now they are awful.

[–] KeenFlame@feddit.nu 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

No, you just worked at bad places

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Sure, but there are a lot of bad places. I bet the majority of engineers work in bad places like this.

[–] mcv@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think so. I've worked at bad, average and good places, but the bad places tend to be larger and far less efficient, so they have to hire more engineers to make up for the inefficiency.

And they don't necessarily pay well either. They see engineers as powerless cogs who have to do what they're told, so they get paid like that too. And then they complain they can't find seniors.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 1 points 2 days ago

Pretty much. The engineering teams ive worked in had maybe one actually good guy, and the rest were awful engineers. I'm not saying I'm super good but I grew up with Linux and networks at home, and was programming from a young age. So im pretty decent. But most engineers had no experience with computers and was in it for the money, obviously.

[–] KeenFlame@feddit.nu 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah, but it's also dependent entirely on if you chase money or actually want to become a good engineer because it is fun.