Are you trolling? Site stability issues very rarely have anything to do with the underlying programming language, unless you're using some experimental language that no one else is using for web development (and even then, Arc seems to be working pretty well for HN).
It's half a dozen employees constantly trying to keep up with what is now a 1 billion page views a month site. From what I understand they're carefully trying to balance getting new hires (which Conde Nast now lets them do) and keep the damn ship afloat.
In the very first place, actually, they wrote the initial version in Lisp. The Python code was a later rewrite.
Reddit was stable for a long time. It's really only been the last few months (~6?) that they've been suffering serious service outages.
Actually, our uptime has been better for the last 6 months than the previous few years.
I don't go on reddit often enough to have any idea about the uptime, but out of curiosity, do you think there's anything that could give someone the impression it was worse recently?
There's enough users that each 3 second downtime is long enough to get someone who submits stories like 'WHY WAS REDDIT DOWN' and enough upvotes to stay on the front page long enough for everyone else to see it. And then recency effect kicks in as soon as reddit is down for another 4 seconds later on.
That's a bit of a stretch... That "reddit is under heavy load" page is an abomination.
Try turning admin mode off. :)
The site is unstable doesn't mean Python is to blame. Perhaps you can elaborate why do you think so.
I dont think reddit's stability is as bad as it looks. Just that Reddit's community is pretty vocal on it. IIRC, they have availability in high 90s (may be jedberg can confirm).
Yes, we are above 99%. We just have a community that is very vocal with things are broken, and then continue to be vocal about it after it is fixed because it is funny.
For example, we heard "search sucks" for weeks after we switched to the new service, until we announced the switch, and then all of a sudden the tune changed. :)