Dynamic bitwise sharding of live stream comment groups

An apparatus comprising a non-transitory computer readable medium encoding instructions thereon that in response to execution by a computing device cause the computing device to perform operations comprising:

• generating one or more shards, a shard identifier being associated with each shard;
• determining a substring of the shard identifier associated with the shard based on a sharding parameter;
• generating groups of users based on the substring of the shard identifier;
• determining whether a number of users included in the generated groups exceeds a maximum number of users;
• in response to determining whether the number of users included in a one of the groups exceeds the maximum number of users, modifying the sharding parameter and determining a second substring of the shard identifier based on the modified sharding parameter;
• and
• generating modified groups based on the second substring of the shard identifier.

An apparatus for generating groups of users accessing content comprising:

• a processor;
• a sharding module coupled to the processor, the sharding module including instructions that when executed by the processor cause the processor to:
• generate one or more shards, a shard identifier being associated with each shard;
• determine a substring of the shard identifier associated with the shard based on a sharding parameter;
• a grouping module coupled to the processor, the grouping module including instructions that when executed by the processor cause the processor to:
• generate groups of users based on the substring of the shard identifier;
• determine whether a number of users included in the generated groups exceeds a maximum number of users;
• in response to determining whether the number of users included in a one of the groups exceeds the maximum number of users, modify the sharding parameter and determine a second substring of the shard identifier based on the modified sharding parameter;
• and
• generate modified groups based on the second substring of the shard identifier.