What did they expect?

Story: London Stock Exchange suffers .NET CrashTotal Replies: 5
Author Content
DrDubious

Sep 10, 2008
9:51 AM EDT
EVERYONE knows a Microsoft Exchange is unreliable...

[intentional pun, not a misunderstanding of what they were running...]
bigg

Sep 10, 2008
10:14 AM EDT
Serious question here. Is there anyone who believes that Windows offers the same stability as, say, Sun's Solaris?

Billions of dollars on the line. Stability is absolutely critical, the only thing that matters. So they're using Windows?

Honestly, I don't get it. What am I missing? This isn't just bringing a knife to gun fight, it's bringing one of those plastic picnic knives to a gun fight.
rijelkentaurus

Sep 10, 2008
10:24 AM EDT
A spife, even!
number6x

Sep 10, 2008
10:27 AM EDT
Even the most robust and fault tolerant OS and Hardware can suffer failure through bad programming.

Just yesterday we closed a bug in a CICS program that was causing system memory to get consumed at an alarming rate. Pressing the attention key (PA1) in a inquiry window was leading to a MAPFAIL condition. This is usually not a problem, but the COBOL program behind the CICS transaction was poorly written and did not handle the condition (catch the exception in more modern programming geek speak). The unhandled condition lead to an AEI9 abend that locked up a chunk of memory. A few of these a day and it started to affect system performance. For years the record sizes and number of transactions a day meant that the total memory affected was small. But after recent enhancements the records had been expanded and real time processing via a J2EE front end was introduced leading to many megabytes of memory being gobbled up on a system that was under much heavier load.

The Moral. It may just be bad programming and not Microsoft's fault.

But remembering those maps of systems calls comparing IIS on Windows and Apache on Linux: http://www.devside.net/blog/apache-iis-sys-calls http://www.basicallytech.com/blog/index.php?/archives/47-Apa...

It sure seems like Microsoft goes out of their way to make it harder, if not impossible, to develop and deploy a highly available fault tolerant system on their software.
gus3

Sep 10, 2008
11:38 AM EDT
Bjarne Stroustrup on programming language design philosophy:

Quoting:C makes it easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes that harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.
Quoting:The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.
The same may be said of operating systems.

Except that Vista is checking not only for "programmer error," but also for DRM violations.
Scott_Ruecker

Sep 10, 2008
12:51 PM EDT
Quoting:Except that Vista is checking not only for "programmer error," but also for DRM violations.


Its kinda sad when the main preoccupation of the OS is to track your actions and verify if its legal of not. Vista cares more about if you want, and if you can do something. Ugh!

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