Ask HN: Is Facebook having serious database inconsistency problems?

14 points·stefanobernardi··6 comments

Lately Facebook groups have become close to unusable due to comments and posts appearing and disappearing randomly. This looks like major db inconsistency / cache problems to me. Is this the case? And, if so, is it due just to their scale or to new development strategies gone wrong.

p.s. I noticed this only in the groups product.

View on HN

I had the experience that some private messages disappeared, the people i send those never got them. It happend more than once where i am sure about it. Maybe i did something wrong but there is no way to find out.

Since then i never send important messages any more over facebook. There is no way you can be sure they got the messages or can find out why they don't got them. E-Mail feels less like a black box.

I've never had those problems, but it could very well be that I never actually knew about them and just assumed people would not reply to me or assume they got my message.

I have seen one other strange behavior. My wife and I use the same laptop. She had logged into FB. When I was using it, i signed out of her account and signed into my account. I then saw some posts from my wife's friends who are not my friends. Strange.

I think a database inconsistency is unlikely, though possible, I imagine they would be very on top of that. It is more likely a caching or replication issue (maybe to do with their new data center -- entirely speculation).

I am also facing the same issue. Number of facebook likes for my sites is also inconsistent. Change in the number is not that significant, however, the inconsistency problem is there.

Confirm. I have same issues with groups.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com