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Comment on How We Built r/Place (2017)

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Last time, wasn't there someone here saying it was easy to do and they could do it in a weekend, and then actually delivered? Can't find it, but perhaps someone here remember more about it?

There are probably a lot of programs that could be built in a weekend. I imagine any competent full-stack developer could make a Twitter clone in an afternoon.

The challenge is making it scale. That developed-in-an-afternoon Twitter clone probably won't be able to handle an active user count in the 4 digits, let alone the 7+ digits Twitter has now.

it's not really a ton of code to write (around 3400 lines) https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit-plugin-place-openso...

the harder part is scaling the number of requests and active websockets

I'm sure it's not too difficult to build if you don't need to scale it up to a similar number of users (especially bots). How would you test that it's actually capable of that? Even the article mentions they ran into unexpected issues despite all the load testing.

Given the right tools, you should be able to handle double the max load that they are expecting given a beefy enough server. Their architecture is a bit too complex for my taste, but given that reddit is written in python it is not surprising that this was the direction that they took. You could use tsung (http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/1/01/about/) to test workloads at that level. This would be a pretty straightforward project to build with erlang/elixir's gen_server abstraction.

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