Typical for 70s and 80s.
Honestly, designing a 21st century database is a different thing if compared to back then.
You can use 128 bit integers, provided that you really want to use integers. And maybe you put a timestamp along.
and maybe put a 32bit timestamp along and pretend it can somehow store more than a 32bit integer can.
You don’t often expect to have two billion of something until you do.
Its defaults are also either a 18-character ID, or a 32bit integer. So, unless you take the effort to actually fight Apex, you're gonna hit this problem sooner or later.
EDIT: And, yes, it is apparently Rails! https://fanlore.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own#Timeline
This kind of workload cheerfully “scales” to your disk capacity.
You can shard them between 2 tables. Then migrate them to a single one later.
But what about my good night's sleep? How can I go to bed without reading about my favorite blorbos?
Real ones back them up in a single .txt file
And that's perfect. Blame the wall too, because it was running just fine. It's a site to write (mostly porn), with better uptime and more daily users than most of the companies posted on HN daily.
4,247,583: Teen And Up Audiences
4,173,082: General Audiences
2,816,083: Explicit
2,271,446: Mature
1,676,061: Not RatedNot really, no. For example, if you drive into the wall, you may die.
Another experience that feels like death is working in a company that implements on-call rotations.
It would be too easy to draw out a parallel between how you approach a free fanfiction website (the website should mystically owe you five 9's uptime) and the mentality that metastased in the industry.
Instead, I'm gonna take this opportunity to point out that the AO3 downtime affected you, as a non-user, enough to vitrify the admin, where hardcore users laughed it off (because they're not entitled toddlers).
Not sure it was that solid.
But sure, I committed a hate crime.
And then I pulled apart PT-OSC to make it more... less incredibly stupid about resource use, so it wouldn't cause too much load while it backfilled. And let it run for about 6 weeks.
Good luck! It's a fun problem to have - excess success, and a light puzzle to solve :)
When I did it, the script was a bit of a mess of trigger setup, and then a backfill that only monitored replica lag, as if the status of the much less heavily used failover instance was somehow the most important part of a database. Hopefully that's no longer true, and none of this is necessary any more.
So I essentially split it in half, so I could keep only the trigger setup, and carefully read the queries the backfill would perform so I could duplicate it. And then wrote a very simple loop of "select N records, copy to new table, check how long that took. scale up by min(5%, 100), scale down by 30%, if outside target bounds".
Intentionally very polite to the main DB, because once the triggers are in place it really doesn't matter how long it takes. It dropped down to single digits at peak load on some days, so I think that was the correct choice.
The only uncomfortable thing there are the explicit references to Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. I do take exception to using real people in fiction if you proceed to heap abuse on the characters which you model on those celebrities. (The story seems to use only the given names, but the tagging makes the link explicit.)
Obviously, you can refer to real world famous people in fiction — it would be silly to write a book about 2025 America and not mention that the president is Trump if it includes political themes — but there are limits.
It's Dead Dove though.
That's much more of a "kick the can down the road" solution to only double your usable range, but if all positive the values in the rows shouldn't actually have to change, just the column metadata, so it could theoretically be more or less instantaneous. I guess in practice this doesn't happen; the server would rather use its generic "rebuild the table" alter method for changing a column type.
But it seems like you could reasonably do it if it's a signed-to-unsigned change and there's no negative values and there's an index on the column to make checking that fact fast. Or one of those third-party/lower-level type tools could let you do it without any checking.
it's interesting that some people are on the internet but is very well insulated! AO3 is very well known for me...
Not sure I'd call it "insulated", the internet is just very, very vast, even when considering "just" the English-speaking web. Then you have all the other "versions" out there too that are kind of hidden to most people :)
Anecdotal, but also first time I heard about AO3, and I'd consider myself having broad interests and generally well-read, although my interests doesn't include fanfiction so maybe not so weird I haven't heard about it before.
FWIW the vast majority of writing on there is decidedly mediocre. There is also an even more inferior alternative called Wattpad.
Funnily enough you learn that in general we aren't all that different in our tastes, it's just that what men like to watch, women like to read / imagine.
Edit: to paint the picture, this[0] was sent to me a while back :-)
[0]https://www.tiktok.com/@alexarowe11/video/746846214634761757...
I don't think it's as gendered as you paint it, but I'd also acknowledge it depends a lot on geographic location, probably looks different where I am compared to where you are, I agree with that we probably aren't all that different in tastes in general :)
I'm sure you can find lots of studies about this, but just for a very easy data point, a few years old survey shows that AO3 is ~54% cis female, ~5% cis male, rest nonbinary/trans/etc.
Fan Fiction isn't strictly about erotica after all, if you filter out the erotica part, the distribution might be a bit different..
I would assume webnovels.com wuxiaworld.com and r/ProgressionFantasy might be more male gendered, even though that some of type of content could easily be on ao3 too..
Well, I've read my share of erotica, maybe I wouldn't say "very into erotica" but well-read enough it seems, compared to my peers.
I guess everyone who happens to read erotica automatically isn't interested in fan-fiction, so they never stumble across AO3, I can hardly be alone in this situation.
I remember when I first stumbled across the main Antimemetics Division storyline on SCP. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
There's also another great one about a spinning disc that ends up opening a portal when placed on a mirror. SCP-093.
"Yeah, we get that a lot."
Having been an active internet user for longer than most AO3 users have been alive, the first time I heard about it was a few years ago in a student radio show about the fanfic genre and culture. Poorly written smut featuring popular culture characters has just never been my thing. Probably because I’m not that much of a fan of any specific fictional setting or franchise in the first place.
Who is a better judge of what is insulated or not, someone who spent decades living in a single city, or someone who spent a few years traveling everywhere?
(I bring up 4chan because by virtue of being practically unmoderated, it is about as unlike a bubble as you can get. Where else do you get people into origami, hardcore rape porn, international backpacking, nobel prize winning mathematicians, and pranksters running iphone microwaving campaigns rubbing shoulders?)
I've been reading fanfiction on the Internet for two decades, so for me it would've been quite hard to miss it.
Kind of crazy to hear. AO3 is so culturally massive I don't know how you miss it.
XKCD on index number exhaution: https://xkcd.com/865/ Remember Data and the Borg? "Accessing... accessing... accessing... accessing..."
https://archiveofourown.org/bookmarks/2147483647
That alpha/beta/omega thing is quite huge apparently, but not something you would ever encounter outside of specific subcultures (like Archive of Our Own):
> Mysql2::Error: Out of range value for column 'id' at row 1 (Mysql2::Error)
https://otwarchive.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/AO...
schoen•7mo ago
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/gangn...
wging•7mo ago