circumference-pie - Tumblr blog

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A very very minor thing I have been curious about for a while, and I'm finally asking: why do you calculate queue posting times the way you do? For example, if I set my queue to post 3x a day, naively I would expect it to post every 8 hours. But in reality it posts every 6 hours with a 12 hour gap between days. Why complicate the math like that?

Answer: Hello @circumference-pie!

Buckle up y’all, it’s story time again!

First: nobody who works at Tumblr right now was a part of the work of planning the default queue implementation, which was more than ten years ago. So the full story behind “Why does it work that way?” has unfortunately been lost to the sands of time. All we can do is tell you how it works today and surmise some reasons why. The queue is actually a very clever system and part of how it works explains some of why it works the way it does. Also, there have been attempts to do what you ask—we still have “Queue 2.0” available in your Tumblr Labs settings, which tries to get closer to how you expect things to work.

Anyway! How the queue works today is not actually a queue in the traditional sense. There is no single list of posts that are in “your queue”. Instead, when you “Add to queue” after creating a post, we’re actually scheduling it to post at a future time, as if you had used the “Schedule post” option instead. We’re just calculating that time on your behalf when you use “Add to queue”, based on your settings, and how many other scheduled posts you have already. We use a secondary “index” model, called “ScheduledPost”, to keep track of posts you have scheduled on your blog. We do mark the ones that are a part of “your queue”, but the data model doesn’t keep one list of your “queue” per se.

You can see this in action on your blog, hiding in plain sight. If you add a bunch of posts to your queue, and then schedule a post for a specific future date, you’ll see both in your blog’s “queue” list, side by side. Because technically to us, they’re the same thing: queued posts are really just another kind of scheduled post, relying on the same always-running service to publish scheduled posts across all of Tumblr. Here’s a fun fact: we typically have about ~14.5 million future posts to publish from this list at any given time and are publishing hundreds of these scheduled posts every second.

So when you’re adding a new post to your queue, what we’re doing behind the scenes is starting at the beginning of your “day”, and creating time slots based on your queue settings. If a time slot is already filled, we move on to the next one. That’s why the default queue scheduler works how you describe—we’re trying to fill those “slots” based on the start of the day, rather than trying to divide the calendar day evenly. This just makes it much simpler for us to understand, scale, and predict when our “peaks” will be. At peak times, the publish-scheduled-posts service is publishing tens of thousands of posts in a manner of seconds. We did rewrite that post-publishing part of this architecture a few years ago to improve its efficiency and solve a lot of “lost post” bugs, but we didn’t change how “Add to queue” works.

However, the Queue 2.0 project available in Labs was an attempt to change the queue system to work as you expect—instead of starting at [beginning of day] and creating enough slots to fit [number of slots] every [number of hours], it tries to divide the calendar day into [number of slots] and fit the result back to the original algorithm’s mapping of the day. We never productionized this alternative approach, because it has a few bugs that some blogs hit in extreme cases, and we’ve never had time to fully fix them. It also can cause a bit of weirdness when time zones diverge, like with daylight savings time. Also, a lot of people prefer the default algorithm, and we haven’t thought of a nice way to transition everyone from one to the other. So for now, both options exist, and you can choose which algorithm for queue-slot-generating you want to use. We hope that makes sense! 

While complicated, it is a great example of a system built by engineers to make sense and be scalable and predictable. But sometimes these kinds of systems, while clever, aren’t very intuitive to understand without digging into how they work.

Thanks for your question, and keep ’em coming. 

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The Legend of Shen Li （与凤行） Xing Zhi + Shen Li textposts 5/?

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If you were to join the hunt, My Lady, I’m afraid not even half of these young men are a match for you.

Xuan Lu as FENG QIWU | Who Rules the World

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The Legend of Shen Li EP01

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我虽然离开了，

但我始终都在。

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Liu Xueyi | The Blood of Youth

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The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.

Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”

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Round 1, Match 7: Haruhi Fujioka vs Jiang Cheng

Match 7 is between Haruhi Fujioka (shixiong: Tamaki Suoh) from Ouran High School Host Club vs Jiang Cheng (shixiong: Wei Wuxian) from Mo Dao Zu Shi

Propaganda under the cut

Haruhi Fujioka:

None submitted

Jiang Cheng:

Clinged to WWX constantly for 7+ years, wanted to have WWX as his right hand man forever after becoming sect leader, cried after WWX left, cried when he discovered what WWX sacrificed for him, was TORN APART when it got explained to him that if they were more outwardly close knit, WWX might not have died

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Love Between Fairy and Devil 苍兰诀 (2022) insp.

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Throwback to when I first watched Nirvana in Fire and the translation called the jianghu the "pugilist world" and all the martial artists were "pugilists." Technically correct. Interesting choice. Anyway, Mei Changsu deserves a dog.

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eagle: so what do you think about stigmata

prometheus: you know we're in a pre-christian myth, right? like that word doesn't exist yet. your dumb joke is anachronistic.

eagle: stigma talons in your flesh

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In Japanese, they don’t say “moon,” they say “tsuki,” which literally translates to “moon,” and I think that’s how language works.

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Best boys or best boys?

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true romance

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WANG YIYAO 王伊瑶 in hanfu photoshoot | The Legend of Shen Li

Wang Yiyao: more photos here hanfu photoshoot: more photos here

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Xing Yun? Where are you going?

The Legend of Shen Li 与凤行 (2024) | Episode 8