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Debugging Microsoft.com

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the belly-of-the-beast dept.

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."

3 of 511 comments (clear)

  1. Missing info... by DaHat · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  2. Re:10Mbits/s? really? by Jeff- · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. I worked for an ISP that was hosting a M$ site ... by adventuregeek · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.