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Why is Github talking about number of commits here, and not pushes? Are there a lot of tools/people using github as an online editing platform?

• recursive 29d ago
  I'm not following your line of questioning. Without ever using github as an online editing platform, you can do one push with two new commits.
  • Brian_K_White 29d ago
    Commits are not expensive, pushes are. You can do any number of commits before you do one push, unless you are editing online, in which case every act is it's own commit & push. You can rig up a local ide to pathologically commit+push per save, but you can do literally anything, so what you can do is immaterial.
    • leptons 29d ago
      >You can rig up a local ide to pathologically commit+push per save The dev system we use for a 3rd party hosting provider (a big one) requires a commit and push for every file save while we're developing. I created a build system for this that copies the whole repo to a temp folder. As we save changes to files in the main repo folder, the build system watches for changes and copies the changed file to the temp folder, then does a commit on the temp folder and pushes to a an intermediary repo in github which then triggers an action that causes the 3rd party system to update from the intermediary repo. This way we don't pollute our main source repo with a commit every time we save an update to a source file. It's not my favorite way to develop but it's caused us no real problems except when github goes down.
      • ninkendo 29d ago
        > requires a commit and push for every file save I don’t think I could imagine a stupider idea than this if I tried. To paraphrase Babbage: I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a solution.
        • Brian_K_White 29d ago
          meh, it's just external undo button. It's useful. It might or might not be worth the cost, but it's not that it delivers no value or causes some harm (other than cost/reliability)
          • esafak 29d ago
            https://delta.dev/ https://delta.dev/
    • orf 29d ago
      Do you have some GitHub architectural knowledge you’d like to share with us? A push pushes commits and blobs and trees and tags. It’s an interesting metric to track, but the core unit of complexity (and expense) worth tracking on GitHub’s side is obviously the commit. There’s a difference between pushing 1 commit and 100.
      • jeremyjh 29d ago
        > There’s a difference between pushing 1 commit and 100. There isn’t much. GitHub doesn’t run actions separately for each commit. It runs them on pushes. I’m trying to think of a thing that would happen for each commit in each push and coming up blank. It does things like scan for references to issues to index, but it would just scan the log for a range. I did disagree with GP though because there is no reason to assume that the ratio of commits to pushes has materially changed. So if that is the proxy they have always used for measuring growth, and they know it reliably does that then I think it’s a reasonable way to communicate this to this audience.
        • orf 29d ago
          > It runs them on pushes Sure, because pushes are how you update a reference. That’s really what triggers an action: a reference changing. And there could be a bunch of those in a push. A commit costs storage, you’ve got secret scanning, it needs to be indexed in a way that can be referenced in commit messages and comments, a commit message itself can close issues or reference other PRs, stored and served individually and immediately via the web UI or git clients, etc etc. It’s also like… the core unit of git.
          • jeremyjh 29d ago
            None of the things you mention - indexing or secret scan would be done individually for each commit. As I already said, this would be a log of all commits in the range pushed - it would be scanned once for those things. There is no need for a loop running over a range of commits and processing each one.
    • meerita 29d ago
      Exactly. You can have 3000 commits in a branch, and unless you don't push each of them one by one, shouldn't be a problem the number.
• kylecazar 29d ago
  GH processes at the commit level for things (including actions) even though they're bundled in a push... it's relevant to the load on their infrastructure.
  • ferngodfather 29d ago
    But they can't process the commit until I push it?
    • dcrazy 29d ago
      A push containing 100 commits is more expensive than a push containing 1 commit.
      • blitzar 29d ago
        But is it 100x more expensive?
        • Groxx 29d ago
          Probably? If you do 100 pushes instead, there is roughly zero additional data. At best you'd be comparing cache costs, which probably are lper for one large push, but there's a ton of calculation and CI that runs per commit regardless of other data being cached.
          • lukevp 29d ago
            Why don’t you have your actions run on pr or push instead of on commit? Why would you even want that? I’ve never seen actions set up that way. If I push a branch with 100 commits then it’ll only run CI once. It’ll show the rest of the commits in the UI, sure, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the same performance impact. It could very well be 1 db transaction with multiple rows written instead of 100. I think you’re reducing this problem too much without knowing their architecture.
            • 29d ago
• johndough 29d ago
  Bigger numbers sound more impressive. "Our billion-dollar infrastructure crumbles under a tremendous flood of 50 PRs per second" would just sound embarrassing.