> Does anyone have any idea why there would be this much code?

It's the world's 3rd biggest website with hundreds of billions of views and dozens of millions of users, so maybe that's why.

I think it's a credit to Python that a website that does that and has grown in a fairly haphazard fashion only has about 1000k SLOCs.

Oh, it wasn't meant to be snarky or a slam -- I'm honestly just curious what kinds of things require so much code? E.g., is it one or two things that dominate usually in codebases this size, or is it just a LOT of components, each of which is tens of thousands of lines long? Do these kind of counts usually include auto-generated code?

that would be 1M LOC split across all the projects, libraries and modules.