Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamEAP | Hacker News Reader

I work closely with the team responsible for a large, self-hosted GitHub Enterprise instance. This is good advice for clients/consumers of GH data, but it can very easily lead to a lot of strain on the server-side. It’s not obvious what fields that you request are simple reads from tables or actually end up invoking git under the hood.

You could argue the rate limit guards should better reflect that, but that’s just not the reality of the system. Likely speaks to a lot of stability issues GitHub has been facing lately.

View on HN

All of the queries my agents use select fields like issue title, body, labels, createdAt, updatedAt, etc. That's about it. I would hope that stuff is cached and efficient to read. I do not think GraphQL is a good way to interact with git. Running git on the CLI is the best way to interact with git.

Isn't it kind of part and parcel of any GraphQL deployment to update it efficiently?

> It’s not obvious what fields that you request are simple reads from tables or actually end up invoking git under the hood.

I'm not familiar with graphql but what would make something "invoke git", is it a technical thing or hyperbole?

My over-simplified explanation: the graphql server will map a field on a request to a resolver. The resolver can execute whatever code it needs to return the value, up to and including calls into libgit.

So asking for the title of a PR might just be an extra column selected on a DB query. But calculating mergability status of that PR might be something else entirely.

That is true for almost any GraphQL backend not just GHE.

It's definitely one source of GitHub's issues. They never implemented limits properly and their codebase is likely decades of cruft and impossible to retrofit quickly (to say nothing of their horrific mysql clusters). If you want to scale and survive it, you have to build the thing right the first time.

You have to be so uptight about performance when you're small that people look at you funny, or your shit is going to fall right over under webscale (ai scale?) load.

> lot of strain on the server-side

That's why GitHub assigns "points" to each requests and deducts based on the data shape you request. For simple requests it's 1-to-1, but can quickly balloon

Well 1. GitHub is the broken & bad one, and 2. isn't that kind of on them? If they're getting a ton of requests that read data awkwardly, the fix seems like the quintessential data engineering task.

You sound like someone who has not been informed about the problem GitHub is facing. No one else is facing anything close to it, so there is no meaning to "the bad one".

https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale

I put my ssh credential behind a tpm and now I notice that every time I switch a chat in ChatGPT it tries to see the current remote status of the branch.

That also doesn’t help with load. So besides what agents are doing themselves the AI companies also have a responsibility of being good citizens.

VS Code does this as well - or maybe the GitHub plugin does it. Either way, GitHub owns it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com