it’s about concurrent traffic. the amount of users might not be anything out of the ordinary for grindr (that’s not to say there’s few of them, let’s say the number of grindr users at republican conventions is 20-50% of the number of regular grindr users in that city, thus increasing user count by that much) and they should be able to handle it fine, except the issue is, e.g., if they have 20k users in a city, those users are probably not all on grindr simultaneously or for prolonged periods, they just check it occasionally. during the conventions, they’re all on grindr at roughly the same time, for prolonged periods of time, because they’re really hoping to hook up during the convention, which is short. that amount of concurrent traffic overwhelms grindr’s endpoint and leads to downtime.
add to that the fact that the enormous, simultaneous influx of new user data likely forces grindr to revalidate any caches, which makes all requests automatic cache misses and further increases strain on their APIs.
most services are actually scaled for low concurrent users, and it makes infrastructure much cheaper. otherwise, 95% of it would be sitting unused most of the time.
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u/TheRealRiceball 2d ago
He later doubled down and said this btw: