For all of it's history (up to and including now possibly?) Github was a big Ruby on Rails monolith. [0] Obviously some things run in their own service, but I'm seeing the core github features fall apart which should be the features packed into the big monolith. If load is this much a problem, not being able to only vertically scale the processes that need the extra headroom is a big problem. Scaling horizontally by just throwing more machines at it, or at least cordoning-off some machines as "the ones that people actually pay for" is all I can think of for an application I can only describe as "accidentally working". Urgency is most-definitely high and that pushes decision making towards permanently-temporary patches instead of actual infra/architecture improvements.

[0] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...