Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

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> A gentle reminder that the whole history is here for show. This is very vulnerable — you can see the times I was in a rush, or when I took my time. You’ll find my mistakes. Either way, all I ask is please be kind. I know there are 50 things I could have done better, but this is a product of the reality at the time — a balance between something that works and something that was cost effective for Christian.

The way I took Reddit's comments were there were things that could be optimised to reduce costs. I've not seen a codebase yet where that isn't true.

Sadly, in the hands of Redditors who think you can host an API on AWS for $1 per million requests comments like come across as "Oh they did shoddy work".

What I think is we're seeing production quality code like the majority of us have running.

Christian talked about this.

A payload of 25 comments vs a payload of 100, takes less time to generate and deliver.

So sometimes, to optimize his users experience, he might request 25 to show something quick to the user and then do a request for 100 and append it.

He also mentioned that he’s being compared to other apps, _not_ to the API limit (which he was under anyway).

So, can it be less?, of course. Heck, he could make it 1/minute or even 1/day. But his quota was 60/min. So why not use the 60?.

The Reddit API usage is as efficient as it can be, server wise, although I’d like to be proven wrong by them.

As far as the app goes, an average of ~330 reqs/user/day is pretty good, considering they built the platform budgeting for 86,400.

Yeah, every time I see that number trotted out I’m just like “and the point is…?”

If there’s an issue with the cost to process that many calls I’m much more suspicious of inefficiency on the API side than the client. Those numbers seem very reasonable.

I think the point of inefficiency was that Apollo could say money and make the costs less than they would be by doing less requests. If someone is saying X is too much it's a valid rebuttal it wouldn't be X but Y if you made a few changes.

I don't think Reddit cares about the number of requests. They just want paid. They weren't caring before when it was free.

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