Could Steemit be Testing Unstable Software in Production?

This is a concern written by @reggaemuffin and revised/posted by @drakos.

When you log on to your steemit.com's account and monitor the network traffic, you can see API requests containing these headers:

You can check it yourself in your browser. Press Ctrl-Shift-I (Firefox) or Ctrl-Shift-J (Chrome) to bring up the console. Go to the Network tab, press Ctrl-F5 for a hard refresh of the page. Whenapi.steemit.com appears, wait a few seconds for the caching to kick in, then click on the last instance of api.steemit.com. A new sub-window will open to the right, scroll down a bit to find the x-jussi headers.

In Chrome

In Firefox

This means that Jussi is active (https://github.com/steemit/jussi). Jussi is a reverse proxy and cache for Steem RPC nodes. Not many people know about it (including myself) and those who do are looking forward to it.

The problem is not that it exists, the problem is that all live traffic on steemit.com is routed through it. We all heard the DDoS talk the last weeks. Could the network's fragility be caused by testing an unstable software, in production? Jussi was marked unstable 2 weeks ago, on Github, perhaps it's more stable now. We don't have a screenshot of the unstable status of that project because the disclaimer is not there anymore. Nevertheless, even if Jussi may be more stable, the website is still acting weird for a lot of users, and we haven't left the grey area yet.

That being said, a warning would have been nice to share by Steemit. We, as witnesses, would have supported you and helped you test it. We could have been given some heads up and tested it out on staging for example. We could have been told they were doing it after steemit.com was already unstable for multiple weeks (and still is).

Disclaimer: Obviously no one knows what's really going on (besides Steemit staff themselves). We don't seek to spread any FUD, but to understand what's happening. And once people start discussing what's going on, the users would be appeased and appreciate all the efforts that Steemit's team are putting in. Flagging people doesn't help, answering their concerns does.