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zbentleytoday at 2:49 AM1 replyview on HN

> the C10k challenge is solved since a long time

This has nothing to do with that.

Any Node.JS application will happily accept 100K connections. They'll all wait for the under-resourced database behind it. That application "solved" the C10K challenge, but it's still overwhelmed.

> it might be possible that the "LLM agent" is requesting the commit contents to "understand" or refer or explain them. Is it a bad thing if it helps users?

The article describes random algorithmically-generated traffic arriving in batched waves from laundered residential proxy IP addresses, a few unrelated hits in a group then gone. That's not the pattern you'd see if end users were asking their agents for help.

> it is a shame that such talented people would not be able to have a proper optimization

It's mostly not static content in the sense that you're implying.

Routes that access a single commit can be cached. But most of the routes scrapers are hitting are e.g. computing diffs between arbitrary pairs of commits, or other computed-on-the-fly views into history.

I'm sure they're already caching their useful-to-real-humans data. As the article said, the vast majority of their traffic is bots hitting those arbitrary, permuted URLs. So whatever cache they're using is probably a) missed almost every time, and b) constantly getting evicted to make room for data served to bots (unless they eschew caching to avoid this--fair--and are thus back to the original issue regardless).

There is no "proper optimization" here. It's not slow to go compute the diff between a random pair of refs, render that into pretty HTML, and serve it. But it costs something more than a cache hit, and doing that dozens-to-hundreds of times a second constantly consumes resources.


Replies

greatgibtoday at 8:17 AM

You raise a lot of wrong points to defend the article author:

> But most of the routes scrapers are hitting are e.g. computing diffs between arbitrary pairs of commits, or other computed-on-the-fly views into history.

Looks like to be wrong based on the article: Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits.

Also, in "how bad is it", there is a bar graph of the tasks requested. And only diff can't be cached, and it is clearly not the most important one.

> batched waves from laundered residentail proxy IP addresses

Again, I don't see anywhere anything stating that there was "grouped" requests that are directly related, except in something not related to AI: The thing that usually takes us down are not scraper bots, but poorly designed CI systems that try to do something stupid like shallow-clone stable.git from 20 different nodes, all at the same time. (Shallow clones are awful. Run your own damn mirror if you're going to do something nasty like that.)

Just "waves" of requests coming from the same "residential proxy IP". But that makes sense because they might come from a same service without being a single "source" trying to scrap for training.

Let's say that I'm chatgpt, or Claude, and I have a lot of user related requests to do things based on the commits there, each one will be a different task, but they will all go through the same pipe, that would be a proxy with the residential IP if the provider notice major websites like this one blocking requests for bots.