[HN Gopher] Solving the Three Stooges Problem
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Solving the Three Stooges Problem
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 33 points
Date : 2021-07-27 18:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reddit.com)
| wayeq wrote:
| And yet.. Reddit seems slower than ever
| bitboop wrote:
| Would it be feasible to do some "intelligent" TTL updates? By
| which I mean, don't let the cached data expire automatically.
| Instead, query a service that informs it of any outage on the
| backend. If an outage exists, the TTL is renewed. Otherwise, the
| TTL is expired.
|
| For the `F5` spammers, they would be served with the stale data,
| until the backend recovers from the outage.
|
| I'm sure I've missed some obvious reason why this isn't a good
| idea. I'd love to know why.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| I can already smell the startup that slaps a neural network in
| front of redis now. I hate that smell.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I think the problem is the service that feeds the cache
| durations is something that can itself have an outage, which
| itself could trigger a cache stampede. Usually to solve these
| kinds of problems you want less new blocks in the block
| diagram, not more.
| cestith wrote:
| If you don't mind serving stale content, you can do exactly
| the opposite. Instead of a relatively short TTL that gets
| extended for failure one can set an infinite TTL and actively
| eject data that's been updated. In either case, having a
| separate service handle checking the query and timing out the
| cache content that is neither part of the frontend nor
| backend _is_ another thing that can break but can be a fairly
| simple, isolated thing that doesn 't break consistently along
| with either the frontend or backend.
| thehappypm wrote:
| This seems reasonable for a read-heavy system (like
| Reddit). In a failure, the content on the site would just
| get staler and staler, but there wouldn't be a heavy
| outage.
| psyc wrote:
| I have little experience with server development. Why should it
| ever be the case that _no_ requests are served? Why doesn 't
| first come, first served apply (to some degree)? Is it assumed
| that every request to a web server will get its own thread, or
| what?
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Yeah I'm wondering why a properly sized thread pool backed up
| with a queue system wouldn't work here.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The Three Stooges were a slapstick comedy trio (if you're
| under 40, ask your parents)._
|
| Meta: it used to be that any society used to have fairly
| consistent cultural references that could be rely upon for
| analogies and such.
|
| Seems with either (a) a larger population, and/or (b) a rising
| tide of more sub-niches and fracturing in entertainment (music,
| TV, movies, etc), it's getting harder to a common base to draw
| upon.
| syoc wrote:
| I completely agree. I fear that the lack of a common cultural
| ground will make society even more individualistic,
| antagonistic and enforce the existing tribe mentality even
| further. It is also something I don't see getting any better.
| There are a lot more divisive trends right know than uniting in
| my opinion.
| barneygale wrote:
| Culture has been hyper-local since forever, and you'll never
| remove that instinct. It's a success story for humanity, not
| a problem to address.
|
| The issue we face today is that it's profitable to provide
| free online arenas where tribes can do battle.
| Loughla wrote:
| I think the larger problem is that hyper-local used to mean
| your neighborhood, family/friends, and generally the people
| around you. You went to the same places, you saw each other
| often, you interacted.
|
| In general, this is not the case anymore. In general, the
| wide-wide world huge tribe has invaded the hyper-local
| space via politics, religion, or whatever else and has
| segmented even those local spaces.
|
| Neighborhood block parties were a thing in the area I live,
| up until about 2004. Now they're a quaint weird one-off
| that one local neighborhood does. People don't know each
| other, other than to know that Joe lives in that house, and
| Sara lives in that one, with no context about who they are;
| until Joe puts a Trump flag up, now everyone knows what
| he's about.
|
| I don't know what my purpose is for writing that, it's just
| an observation I've made.
| dhosek wrote:
| A lot of that hyperlocality was because the only way to
| hear music was to go to a live performance. The only way
| to enjoy a dramatic performance was to go to a live
| performance. In the era before widespread dissemination
| of printed materials and widespread literacy, the only
| way to enjoy a literary work was to--you guessed it--go
| to a live performance. This meant, among other things,
| that there was a period of time when a larger portion of
| the population was able to make a living (albeit not
| necessarily a _good_ living) through arts performance.
| Jerry Lewis, for example, got into show business to
| support his family (this was also the case with the Marx
| brothers a generation earlier). As technology has
| increased the ability to disseminate artistic work, it
| has become a smaller fraction of the population gaining a
| wider audience. Some of the trends, e.g., streaming
| music, have ended up with recorded music becoming
| economically unviable for smaller acts (the numbers are
| widely disseminated so I won 't get into that). Not sure
| where things are going from here, or what the anomalous
| period in human culture really was or will be.
| Outpost13 wrote:
| _hm?_ let me try to answer with some thoughts about (OT)
|
| 'An other definition of littering Culture?', i thought
| yesterday... 'Throw-away-culture ? Social disposable
| Culture ?
|
| An evading government Off-the-rails controversies
|
| There is talk of: "Serious charcateristic 'changes,
| variances, mutations'"
|
| 'Speculative security reached critical marks'
|
| ...may be some of 'the news' headlines
|
| '...Just for one day' (Quoting D. Bowie) ^^
|
| Hint: looks like 'we all want a windowplace but are only
| growing shaddows...'
|
| reagrds...
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > In general, this is not the case anymore.
|
| In the US at least, this hasn't really been the case
| since the telegraph went in.
| rgoulter wrote:
| It was interesting to see the most-disliked YouTube Rewind.
| There were so many large YouTube channels and communities in
| the video that the average viewer wouldn't recognise most of
| them.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > Meta: it used to be that any society used to have fairly
| consistent cultural references that could be rely upon for
| analogies and such
|
| Yeah, and it was mostly limited to the Bible, some classical
| mythology, and Shakespeare.
| petercooper wrote:
| You're right. My parents used to witter on about all sorts of
| old fashioned things that I've remembered and refer to (e.g.
| Monty Python quotes) simply because my parents and The Simpsons
| were almost all I had as cultural guides. I know who the Three
| Stooges are entirely because of a reference a doctor makes in
| The Simpsons! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmBj8r1-fDo
|
| Nowadays, the Internet offers thousands of entertainment
| choices in every sub genre with a million memes generated every
| minute and modern audiences like that, so until The Three
| Stooges turn up in a popular GIF or TikTok...
| jedimastert wrote:
| I was just about to comment on this, but in a different way.
| I'm 26, most of my friends are early-to-mid twenties, and all
| of them would get a Three Stooges reference, or at least know
| who they are. It almost always feels super condescending to say
| it like "if you're under..." as opposed to "if you don't know
| them, they were a staple of physical comedy and comedy of
| errors, you should definitely look them up". Definite "You
| wouldn't get it kid" vibes that I'm never a fan of.
|
| > it used to be that any society used to have fairly consistent
| cultural references that could be rely upon for analogies and
| such.
|
| I wouldn't agree with that, or at least I wouldn't put this
| nearly as recent as you make it sound. I think that idea fell
| away when we stopped having folk tales. In America, I would
| point to the fall of the tall tale, like Paul Bunyan or John
| Henry. As someone who grew up adjacent to Appalachia, story-
| telling was a big part of my cultural education. I think it's
| something I was to pass to my kids too.
|
| As a side note, in making this comment I came across the
| wikipedia page for "American Folklore" and it's actually a
| really interesting read.
|
| https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Folklore_of_the_United_States
| barneygale wrote:
| Culture went through a brief period of heavy homogenisation
| while terrestrial television was a big thing. The Three Stooges
| never aired in my country, but I still got the reference.
|
| It's still homogenised, and with the advent of the commercial
| internet, subcultures are exposed to reactionary backlash
| before they have time to properly develop and establish
| themselves.
| toxik wrote:
| Hasn't this problem been well understood for a long time? I
| recall ten, fifteen years ago, our reverse caching proxy would
| let us serve stale requests for a given location while exactly
| one actual request got through. Isn't what they describe more or
| less that?
| dcminter wrote:
| It's a discussion of their solution to the Thundering Herd
| problem. They reference this but don't give any reason for giving
| it a new name.
| tabtab wrote:
| I for one approve the renaming.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| "Who are these Stooges you speak of?"
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| From the title, I wasn't sure if this wasn't a different resource
| management problem. "Take off your hat"
| "Raise your right hand." "Place your left hand here."
|
| https://youtu.be/sxAk3B_zS5k?t=12
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(page generated 2021-07-28 19:02 UTC)