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Comment by jwheare2 | Hacker News Reader

The issue of the missing chat history is actually a rare bug we have at the moment combined with bad timing.

When we're under heavy load (e.g. Freenode is netsplitting) our cache can get backed up. The cache is where your logs are served from when you reconnect a client.

At the moment we don't do a good job of detecting a slow cache and re-requesting from the primary log storage, but we're working on a fix for that, as well as improving cache performance so it doesn't get backed up as much.

It just so happened that there was a large split on Freenode earlier today, around the time you posted this message.

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It's not that "rare" if my buddy was able to replicate it just by opening irccloud in a browser on another computer. So is it rare that it happens, but when it happens it happens to everyone in one network?

Your systems have to be seriously fucked up if freenode netsplitting causes "heavy load" this is super easy to parse text data we're talking about.

Edit: 4 downvotes but nobody interested in explaining why it makes sense for freenode netsplits to break the entirety of irccloud (which they do, regularly).

My guess is you're being downvoted for profanity and negativity, nothing about technical explanations.

Try rephrasing your question in a way that the parent is more likely to respond to.

>My guess is you're being downvoted for profanity and negativity, nothing about technical explanations.

The negativity is very well deserved, shit code is shit code.

IRCCloud is a service with less than 200k registered users (being optimistic here, realistically the number is closer to 143578) out of which maybe 10% are active (that's being super optimistic too) so that brings us to about 20k users.

With ~20k connected users the service can barely manage to remain operational when any of the bigger networks experience netsplits, which happens all the time. IRC networks are constantly getting DDoSd.

If their service can't even deal with normal everyday load, that's a sign of serious issues.

The only conclusion is that IRCCloud must be very badly implemented and suffers from serious technical deficiencies, I believe "fucked up" is appropriate here.

This isn't a daycare, if someone finds "fuck" offensive they should probably just pull out their ethernet cord.

It's not about the word itself. It's that people here can express their opinions in better ways typically. Every service has bugs. This is one of theirs. Whatever software project you create will have bugs. That's the world we live in.

"fucked up" blames the developers - did you really intend to say they fucked up, by providing a non-critical service that's very usable almost all the time and has cache coherency issues occasionally. Missing chat history is not a serious technical deficiency if it can be simply re-requested. If you really wanted to rant at them and say their service is fucked up, then downvotes are deserved.

>"fucked up" blames the developers - did you really intend to say they fucked up, by providing a non-critical service that's very usable almost all the time and has cache coherency issues occasionally. Missing chat history is not a serious technical deficiency if it can be simply re-requested. If you really wanted to rant at them and say their service is fucked up, then downvotes are deserved.

I'm guessing you don't use IRCCloud very much then?

It's not just cache coherency issues, IRCCloud slows to a crawl/stops working entirely when there's bigger splits.

And when are the developers not to blame? If you write code that doesn't work it tends to be your fault that it doesn't work, unless of course management forced you to write bad code.

>If you really wanted to rant at them and say their service is fucked up, then downvotes are deserved

No, I'm just annoyed by how he completely sidestepped the actual underlying issues, e.g their service being unable to support their current user counts.

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