I wouldn't be surprised for GitHub to eventually auto archive projects if they haven't been modified in X years and move them to cold storage. This could probably result in some significant cost savings.
Cold storage typically means offline storage. That is not what this is. The storage needs to be just as fast as any normal repo. The point of this change is not an infrastructure one, but an organizational one, as a signal to viewers of the repo that the repo is no longer being maintained.
No - but they could optimize it internally to keep it out of caches, deduplicate to a single server, etc.
That should probably be based on access patterns, not on mutability flags. If it's "archived", but has 1K downloads a day it should be in cache.
Not necessarily just as fast. I remember reading about Facebook's "cold storage" mechanism a few years ago, where for rarely accessed media they would move it to a slower but cheaper data storage. The media is still available when someone tries to access it, but there might be additional latency compared to a non-cold stored item.
I understand that's not currently what this is. I'm just saying that this could be a precursor to this. You're right that I misspoke with "cold storage." What I meant was a higher latency
but lower cost storage medium (e.g. Glacier vs. S3).