In fact, all HTTP access redirects to HTTPS for just about everything. And most modern browsers (recent versions of Chrome and Safari) that have accessed a website over HTTPS once happen to _prefer_ HTTPS by default for that site.
They are shipping a heavily modified GCC that originally was forked in 2008. The version of GCC they ship is entirely based on LLVM via Clang and is intended to be a hold-over for everything to transition to Clang over LLVM.
Never on iOS though. Most of the features Google added to the Android version of Maps never made it to iOS, for whatever reason (be it Apple not allowing it or Google decided they didn't want to).
At the time of the outage, the status site was seeing upwards of 30,000/req minute.
AS we scaled up dynos, we would see temporary performance improvements until the status site would stop responding again. In the short term, this led to us massively increasing dynos as quickly as we could as it appeared that CPU burn was a significant cause of the slowness (at the time). This was in part caused by all the dynos repeatedly crashing. That's how we ended up going from 8 previously to 90.
Once the database problem for the status site was identified and resolved, we began scaling down dynos to a smaller number.
What prevented you from just caching the status page and then refilling the cache manually every X seconds ? I'm sure a status that is a few seconds old given the system wide meltdown wouldn't have been an unreasonable compromise ?
Of course it is relevant. A large Android market share keeps Apple on it's toes and as mrich said, consumers win. It also means that although Apple is winning by profit margins at the moment, they may not be in the future.
