Ask HN: Why Reddit is still crashing?

3 points·tarikozket··9 comments

Right now, if you would try to enter Reddit, it says "all of our servers are busy right now" and most of the times "this page is temporarily in read-only mode due to heavy traffic".

Why is it still happening in 2017 after many successful examples like Facebook, Twitter etc.?

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Reddit employee count [2015]: ~100

Twitter employee count: 3,583

Facebook employee count: 17,048

WhatsApp engineer count[2015]: ~50

https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

While true, accomplishing the scale that WhatsApp did with 50 employees is significantly harder and more impressive than being able to serve the same kind of traffic with 1,000 employees building the infrastructure to support such feat.

Sort of related but not about the main site being down: search crashes way more often than I expected it would for such a popular site. I read an AMA by the CEO that said they're rolling out a new search by (the end of?) this summer. Probably not enough resources to scale up as fast as they want to.

Technical details aside, it could be because a high-impact news story is running on Reddit (and isn't available elsewhere, neither on FB/Twitter or mainstream news)

They have what 100 employees. That is not enough to run a 8 billion monthly pageviews site.

The heavy traffic right now is probably due to #BuckinghamPalace

> #BuckinghamPalace

What's happening? Reddit is down.

presumably http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/royals/q..., at least that's on the top of /r/all

Disqus has 51 employees and manages 17 billion pageviews.

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