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Debugging Microsoft.com
teslatug writes "Channel 9 has an interesting video interview with Chris St.Amand and Jeff Stucky who test and debug Microsoft.com. They reveal some of the big problems they used to face such as recycling processes every 5 minutes due to memory leaks and 32 bit limitations, and being unable to push more than 10 Mbits of data to their datacenters due to Windows' networking stack limitations."
The summary is missing the fact that many of their problems went away after upgrading to an early 64 bit version of Vista with its improved networking stack.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
1. mplayer
2. xine
Not that tough, really, now is it?
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. -- Albert Einstein
The limitations discussed in the video of the Windows TCP stack are not limited to Windows. These are limitations imposed by a to-the-spec implementation of TCP. TCP is 30+ years old, and it wasn't designed for the kinds of networks it runs on today.
The new TCP stack in Vista effectively implements TCP is such a way that it removes these limitations while preserving compatibility with old stack implementations.
No, no, no... they can saturate a 10MB/s connection easily. What they had problems with was database connections over a long distance (a problem with TCP, not windows)... which they rectified (using a concept called CTCP), check this paper out: http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.a spx?type=Technical%20Report&id=940
-everphilski-
The one on the left is Coke, the other 3 are Red Talking Rain. Personally, I'm a Green Talking Rain programmer, but I can respect teh other side :) Talking rain (particularly green) is the nectar of the programmers here in Seattle.
:)
You see, Microsoft started the great thing a few years back where every floor was stocked with 2 giant refrigerators of free soda. The rest of the local software companies quickly moved to copy this ingenious move, so you can't program and not be in contact will all the free soda you can drink. This sounds pretty cool until you've done it for about 2 years. At that time, assuming you are not a natural soda addict, the last thing on earth you want to drink is any kind of beverage with sugar in it, because you are so unbelievably sugared out. In come Talking Rain. Talking Rain is a simple carbonated spring water, with just a hint of fruit oil added, and no sugar. Green Talking Rain adds lime oil, and Red Talking Rain adds Rasberry, I think, although being a Greener myself, I never really paid attention. The fact that only senior programmers have completed this Talking Rain pupation, allows you to easily glance at someone's trash can in their office and peg them for a Senior or Junior level developer. You will almost never see a Junior level developer drinking Talking Rain, and almost never see a Senior level NOT drink it. Kind of a free soda pecking order.
Of course I may be reading to much into this, but my Greener roots run deep
Latency and bandwidth are not orthogonal when you have flow control. Try looking up 'bandwidth delay product' and tcp windowing. To achieve 1gbp/s to mars you need to buffer all that data in case of packet loss. Available memory will throttle your throughput.
A quick web search says round trip times to mars are between 10-50 minutes. Say 60 minutes * 60 seconds = 360 gigabits of window space to achieve full line rate. Now consider some minor packet loss and even with SACK you're buffering an unreasonable amount of data.
Annoying that the parent got modded up with bad information and this post will likely be passed over.
It was one of there secondary sites, something like blah.microsoft.com. The ISP was supposed to be hosting it on a colo NT box as part of an outsourced hosting contract. Well the site crashed constantly and the support team got sick of the late night pager calls and moved it over to a BSDI box with Apache and spoofed the server headers to read IIS, never told the M$ guys.