from Hacker News

Google on today’s massive Google+ spam influx: “We ran out of disk space”

by suneliot on 7/10/11, 5:55 AM with 41 comments

  • by ChuckMcM on 7/10/11, 7:14 AM

    Interesting. Given the minimum size of a Colossus cluster I find the explanation Vic gives unsatisfying. That being said I'm pretty impressed with the overall product, it is the best attempt yet to unseat Facebook, and I predict it will if Facebook can't come up with a credible response quickly.

    The killer feature is that its blended with Gmail, and since a lot of people keep gmail open all the time it means you get notified and you see stuff. Not as common to keep one's facebook page open.

  • by tybris on 7/10/11, 5:16 PM

    Not so long ago hard disk space was abundant, then programmers realized hard disk space was abundant.
  • by adaml_623 on 7/10/11, 8:46 AM

    Shouldn't there be a Beta tag on the Google Plus icon. Perhaps they left it on Gmail for so long they didn't think anybody would pay attention to it anymore.
  • by craigmccaskill on 7/10/11, 7:22 AM

    Some quick napkin math on numbers:

    If you're to believe Eric Schmidt when he says 'millions' and put that at 3 million users (being generous), guessing that each user uploads 20 megabytes of content (again, generous) thats:

    3x10^6 × 20 MB

    6x10^7 MB or

    60TB

    Sanity check or does that not seem like a lot of resources to allocate to a project of this size?

    Edit: formatting

  • by oflannabhra on 7/10/11, 8:41 AM

    So I guess "field testing" is the new beta testing? Google watered down beta by applying it to finished products to the degree that they've had to invent a new term to fill its function.
  • by benologist on 7/10/11, 6:59 AM

    I still have this happen, and every time I tell myself right, today I'm going to put in a warning system that'll stop this happening .... and then I clear up a ton of space and move on.

    HTTP.sys logging has been a real pain in my ass, every time I deploy a new server I forget to disable it and we do so much traffic it fills the drive completely overnight.

  • by staunch on 7/10/11, 6:51 AM

    Running out of disk space is probably the single biggest category of server problem that occurs.
  • by robryan on 7/10/11, 11:00 AM

    Seems today and yesterday (for me and those I have invited anyway) there has been no issue with creating an account straight away. So I'm guessing this has sent the total users on the service up pretty fast.
  • by senthilnayagam on 7/10/11, 11:42 AM

    running out of diskspace is devops 101, it is high time these colossus startups start publishing which CMM level standard they meet