[HN Gopher] Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow ...
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       Reddit's photo albums broke due to Integer overflow of Signed Int32
        
       Author : Rebles
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2022-12-13 21:45 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
        
       | Rebles wrote:
       | Two days ago, Reddit ids have finally incremented passed the
       | 2,147,483,647, or the maximum range of a signed int32. It seems
       | one of Reddit's subsystems, the one that serves its photo albums
       | broke due to the integer overflow.
        
         | fdgsdfogijq wrote:
         | Someone probably joked they would never reach that scale when
         | they wrote that code
        
           | kristopolous wrote:
           | Thinking "when that gets anywhere close to a problem we'll
           | have vast resources and plenty of time to fix it" and then,
           | I'm guessing, that person left a few months later and nobody
           | owned that part of the code because it worked.
           | 
           | Then 10 or so years went by...
        
           | sph wrote:
           | And one day someone will wonder why the hell did we ever
           | think no one would ever reach 2^64 rows in a database table.
           | Or that 2^128 IP addresses would be enough.
        
       | Thaxll wrote:
       | The famous AUTO_INCREMENT that you though you would never
       | reach...
        
       | davidjfelix wrote:
       | A classic case of "ids aren't numbers even if you choose to make
       | them numeric"
        
       | madrox wrote:
       | A long time ago we discovered Twitter used a round robin of three
       | servers for assigning IDs to tweets. We inferred the round robin
       | was done by doing mod 3 of a signed int32, and because that space
       | doesn't divide neatly by two it meant one of the three servers
       | saw less load than the others and we could map ID assignment
       | volume according to how often it overflowed and hence estimate
       | total tweet volume for a given period.
       | 
       | Some of the details escape me (this was a decade ago) but it was
       | a fun combination of statistical inference and CS knowledge that
       | I don't get to use often. Whenever integer overflow comes up in a
       | systems engineering context I get a little tickled.
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-13 23:00 UTC)