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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."
Again, what a nice way to push people to 64bit and make everything look outdated that's been in use so far, when all you'd need is a non-sucking OS.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Hey, Microsoft has to eat their own dogfood if they want to keep some modicum of credibility no matter how bad the food tastes...
Maybe he isn't using i386.
Or... just that: "one of the busiest websites on earth was having problems with the current generation and what benefits they achieved with the new stuff... and of course if that works for such a high traffic website... just imagine what it could do for yours or mine... let alone our desktops!"
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
http://wm.microsoft.com/ms/msnse/0511/25766/micro
While I usually RTFA (unlike most slashbots) I think we can all agree that at 40 minutes maybe 1/2 a percent of
/me waits for the transcript
And yea, I saw the cans, but the bit-rate of that video is so low, I have no clue what they were. Maybe that red one on the left is a coke or dr. pepper?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Those are players, the codecs are still proprietary and binary only.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
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."
Micro$oft needs 64 bit so it can leak more memory faster and stay running. Or at least this is how I read this.
As for 10mbs, maybe they should put a Linux/BSD/UNIX cache in front of those servers like MSNBC did to get through the last olympics.
Microsoft does this all the time. They call it eating their own dogfood. In a way, it's quite smart actually. One, it shows customers that they aren't afraid to run their own product. Two, it helps them learn how to use and support their products in a large network. And three, it helps them find defects in the software.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
Ze Lame filter, it does nothing.
Whoever modded this +1 Funny should be shot in the head for crimes against humour, the post was nearly as long and boring as the friggin video linked in the article, after the first line the joke was over, but did it end? Nuh-uh. It just kept on going and going like a 5 year old telling you a knock-knock joke for 15 minutes. Like watching corpses discussing lawn care at a Christmas party or making jokes about software that was outdated a decade ago. NOT FUNNY.
If you started reading the post and laughed; good, if you read it to the end (and you know you didn't) and were still laughing (impossible, since you didn't read to the end anyway, you liar) you should wipe the cheetos outta your hair plastered face and beat yourself bloody with a VHS copy of Jerry Lewis' "Slapstick" (i.e. the most non-humerous object known to man).
Oh and have a nice day. Additionaly: Microsoft, much like your humour, also sucks.
You listed *players* not codecs. I will assume you meant one of the players you listed with the binary win32 codecs that usually get installed under /usr/lib/win32. They do work well and I use them. However, they are basically 32-bit x86 only, so if you are not running 32-bit x86, you are SOL. Maybe the GP is running PPC Linux or a 64-bit Linux? Or maybe the GP doesn't want to run binary only win32 dll files on his computer?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
People like us aren't running web sites that process 10 to 15 Gigabits per second.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
A couple of years ago, a Linux machine running Tux could saturate GigE on the standard Specweb benchmark with two of its processors disabled, and windows couldn't with all four in play.
It's not TCP that's keeping windows down.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
You're confused. Just because you can push 480Mb/s doesn't mean you're getting 480Mb/s throughput on any given connection. Suppose you had 1Gb/s on two connections seperated by 5000 miles. You really think you're going got get 1Gb/s? You think you're going to get 500Mb/s? 100Mb/s? The inherant latency delays in the protocol make it impossible to get anywhere near optimum bandwidth.
Sure, you can push 480Mb/s to 100 4.8Mb/s connections, but you're not going to push 480Mb/s to one. THAT is what they're talking about.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
You realize that that article talks about issues that had been long since solved by 1996, and list the solutions to them? In the case of the particular quote, the TCP Window Scale Option.
In other words, TCP is a protocol, not an algorithm.
So ... if Vista has some fabulous new algorithms for implementing TCP, then why can't other OSes be patched to benefit from those algorithms also? OR, if Vista is implementing something other than TCP, then how can it be (fully) backwards compatible?
Seems like the word "compatibility" might need to be scrutinized here.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Surely.
But you know that does not really solve the problem. Window Scale just allows you to "adjust" your window further than the 64Kb. Also a packet loss with a large window has some dramatic consequences, and to address that is not easy.
Second large windows degrade what we call "fair queuing" mechanisms: splitting bandwidth over multiple TCP/SWP connections. Large windows cause a lot of congestion.
I am not a Windows user myself:
[ 16.784315] TCP reno registered
[ 16.784454] TCP westwood registered
[ 16.784487] TCP highspeed registered
[ 16.784515] TCP hybla registered
[ 16.784542] TCP htcp registered
[ 16.784570] TCP vegas registered
[ 16.784597] TCP scalable registered
I've all those TCP "flavours" available. Some are good for high-speed links, some for high-latency, some for low-congestion and so on.
There are some other issues around that may arise if you have some other "active" node in between the endpoints (such as routers). But you know that.
This is why I love AAL5 (ATM)
What "modern" OS still runs a TCP stack as it was created many, many moons ago?
TCP has evolved quite a bit over the last 30 years, and new RFCs and other standards are constantly enhancing and obsoleting older versions of the standard.
You seem to imply that an implementation built today "to-the-spec" would be built against on some 30-year-old draft and design. Today's TCP standards (which include a number of "experimental", "optional", "designed-for-high-latency" etc extensions), however, are quite capable of running on the "networks it runs on today".
Windows has never had the BEST stack, but it's at least been fairly comptetive (and even the original Win95 add-on wasn't based on "30-year old spec"). Win2k, for example, included a relatively good implementation of SACK and NewReno and recovery mechanisms (See RFCs 2581 and 2582 which were posted only in 1999).
I'm not sure what TCP changes Vista has over previous revs, but like every other OS vendor I'm sure Microsoft is trying (and may or not be succeeding =) to improve the performance/scalability of their stack, partly by keeping current "standards", RFCs (like 3782, the 2004 obsoleting of 2582), drafts, etc in mind.
What do yu mean, he delibertely handicapped himself. Like there's only "One True Format".
Hey, its not like they can't make the stuff available in multiple formats. Oh, right, this is Microsoft. They really can't handle multiple formats. Look at Word.
Oh haven't you heard? Microsoft is all for open formats now. I'm sure they are planning to release source code for their codecs any day now. Just you watch. Me and the Channel Nine fanboys are holding our breath till then just to hurry them up!
And even then, both xine and mplayer fail to play some newer formats, like the latest version of WMV. Which is a shitty format to begin with, but it's all arround the internet it seems...
maybe it has to do with using Akamai's Linux servers for caching?
>>We used to receive a stupid "too many conections" from ODBC in our log, and restarting the stupid services woudln't do a damn thing, all you could do was restart the machine
This just proves one thing: theres no substituion for GOOD engineering.
Either your experience is more than 5 years old (in which case your observations are simply not relevant), or you have no idea how to create real web applications with MS tools.
7 years ago I wrote an online transaction system (think webservice before webservices existed) that hasn't been rebooted since the day it went live. Well, there were a couple of power failures in the data center, and we upgraded the O/S to 2000, but those we're not the fault of the application. At the time, ODBC was already being passed up by OLEDB, which was shortly passed by ADO. Everyone who had half a clue moved away from ODBC for anything but simple Access databases, and nobody with half a brain would connect a production web-application to a corruptable file-based DB.
Anyways, the point I'm getting around to making here is that competent engineers working in either environment can, and have, produced very solid applications. If you've got a good designer building on a proven architecture, THAT THEY UNDERSTAND INTIMATELY, you're likely to have a good product in the end. If you slap together some code to spit out pretty pages without really understanding how the whole thing works together, your gonna have issues.
Experience Rocks!
But since you mention it... you compare a content provider's decision to use HTML (an open standard which anyone may implement, and which even degrades gracefully to text, and so is usable on platforms without a web browser) with a decision to use Windows Media Video (a proprietry video codec that is only available on a single platform). Then you say,Content provider can just as easily make their content available in an open format, one which anyone can implement. Their content will then be viewable on any conceivable platform. So why are content providers so determined to turn away the fraction of their potential customers that don't run Windows?
> What I mean is, nothing aside from his own principles stop him from using a Windows PC to watch the video.
And possibly the cost of an Intel based machine, and the Windows licencing costs....but of course, those are irrelevant aren't they?
Advanced users are users too!
And they still manage to have a service outage for at least a few minutes to a few hours a month. AIM and Yahoo! don't seem to do that to me.
Administration, software issues, whatever. MSN isn't that amazing, especially compared to the other services.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
... Google runs on several thousand PC-class servers.
;-)
Yeah, but Google's servers aren't just passing bits around, they store a copy of the whole (freely accessible) web.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
MANY users? I would guess the percentage of isolated personal workstations on non-x86 (or PPC MAC) platforms at .000001% of total users. Seriously, the number of people who only have non PC workstations is so low as to be complete noise.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Microsoft--and the two staffers shown in this video--deserve strong praise for the *unedited* candor, the self-depricating humor, and the absense of spin on this video.
:-)
Maybe I've missed the comments, but what no one seems to mention here is that these guys--clearly both geeks at heart (in a good way)--really are peeling back a lot of the layers of MS's site. The candor about their security problems, the 2gb memory issues, and a variety of other things was refreshing.
Heck, they even mention firefox.
Good work all. Good work.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
He's complaining he can't watch a video linked to from /. , a site which espouses open standards and cross platform stuff and you know the deal.
If he was making this complaint from inside MS, fair enough, he's a dick. But he's making this complaint from the WWW, a wild and wooly place where platform shouldn't matter as much.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
A corporation is a legal fiction. Period. Without the legal framework to support it, there is no such thing as a corporation. Thus, any corporation, no matter how powerful, is, at its base, a fictitious entity.
If you insist on describing everything in terms of people, that's fine: a corporation is a group of people avoiding taking responsibility for their decisions by hiding behind a legal fiction.
Laws can, and do, change. Whole legal systems get torn down a rebuilt from scratch, sometimes better than they were before, and if you think ours will last forever you are a fool, and should study your history. The best we can hope for is gradual change and not violent overthrow.
But, you're right: I'm not going to change it, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it either, nor does it mean things won't change. There are a lot of options between acceptance and "raging against it til the end of my strength". My choice is to add my voice to the others grumbling about the situation. Grumbling is infectious, you know, and the nice thing about living in a democracic system is that if enough people start grumbling, things get done. You could substitute "capitalist" for "democratic" if you like, either is capable of achieving the desired end, more or less by the same means.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You are confused. MPlayer works because it is built with many native codecs that aren't dependant on x86 binary DLLs. It's the newer formats such as WMV3/RealVid3/VP5/VP6/etc that you can't play on non-x86 machines yet.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Just like nothing, aside from your own principles, is stopping you from getting a fuel-effecient hybrid car.
I guess money must be a matter of principle now.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If you think that AIM never goes down, you have no idea what you're talking about. I've had AIM shit out on me MANY, MANY times, and yes, this is with the actual AIM client. It'll kick me off, and I won't be able to sign in for a few minutes, sometimes it'll get stuck at verifying login/password and just sit there until it times out, etc.
AIM has its server problems too.
Also, not everyone who disagrees with you is an astroturfer. As hard as it may be to believe, some people might ACTUALLY have different experiences and opinions as you.
But Apache never crashed (and this was on a comparatively memory-poor box by today's standards - 256 meg), just took a second or two ... and nobody else connected to the box complained.
.NET framework is and how much bang for my buck I can get out of ASP.NET on IIS. Sometimes I pick Java for those rare cases one needs a server application to be portable.
Apache, like IIS, has a finite number of threads it uses to handle incoming requests. If you use up all those threads, Apache, and IIS, can't respond. You either must increase the number of threads or users will be denied access to the site. Eventually, you run out of system resources. In either case, you've prevent one (or likely a lot more) request from being fulfilled by the web server. End of story.
Your example is a foolish one. You never caused Apache to run out of resources. If you had, it would have "crashed" as the originally posted meant it... it couldn't handle further requests. That wasn't because Apache is superior in some way to IIS, it's because your clicking didn't use up all the threads. Simple as that. That's what I was explaining... the same thing can happen to Apache as can happen to IIS. Just because Apache is open source doesn't make it invulnerable to resource exhaustion due to inept programmers.
No, its Windows that pretty much has no credibility. The one thing it DOES have that nobody else has is the widest selection of trojans, viruses, worms, and idiot users.
That and the majority of the fortune 500 companies running on it. Windows is a fully capable server platform, and there are countless examples to back that up... just as there are countless examples that show that Linux can be a capable server platform. My point was that IIS is not inherently flawed as the original poster suggested. In fact, IIS 6.0 is in my opinion the best web application server on the market if cost is not an issue. (Windows licenses can be too expensive for a small company.) It's had extremely few security holes (FAR fewer than Apache has in the same timeframe), it's very fast (thanks to advanced features like kernel mode listeners), it's extremely reliable thanks to application isolation, process recycling, and great management and monitoring tools, and it's host to many excellent development platforms from PHP to ASP.NET.
IIS 7.0 is shaping up to be even better with some great ways to customize the web server to make it as bare metal as possible if that's what you want.... taking a hint from Apache in this case.
But for you to sit there and question the intelligence of somebody who uses Windows as a server platform shows your ignorance. It shows you don't bother to really examine alternatives to what you're comfortable with. When choosing a platform for a project I make sure to consider as many things as possible... from portability requirements, to intellectual property issues, to performance, to cost, to ease of development. That's my job as a software architect. Sometimes I choose LAMP for its very low initial cost. (Basically free.) Sometimes I pick ASP.NET because of how robust the
Regardless, there are lots of options out there and until you're able to pick the best one for the job at hand you're just going to be limiting yourself for no good reason. Both career wise and intellectually.
Sure, let him edit however it pleases him, but why can't they export it in something anybody can use, such as mpeg? I mostly write in TeX, but I don't expect to distribute documents by sending out a TeX or dvi file. I generate a PDF so that anybody can read it.
So because AIM simply refuses to connect instead of giving you the useful info that the service is down (and thus don't bother trying to troubleshoot your computer/network) means that it never goes down?
posted right as the geeks of the world are getting home from work
No, just the geeks of your time zone - some of us were already asleep...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Seriously, the number of people who only have non PC workstations is so low as to be complete noise.
I own an Amiga 2000 in addition to my x86 workstation, but that doesn't mean I'm going to browse the web with it if someone decides to make something that only plays on Workbench.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I imagine that the price tag, the exposure to malware (one of the big reasons I don't use MS products myself), and possibly the lack of PPC and/or 64-bit versions of MS-Windows and/or the codecs might have something to do with it.
What your assertion basically amounts to is: "He should run x86/32 and use an illegal copy of MS-Windows rather than run a Free (and probably free) OS and player on the hardware of his choice."
Let's put this in modern, everyday terms. Imagine Sony's media companies releasing only DVDs that work only on Sony players. I own a Panasonic player. You're telling me that I should buy a Sony player at whatever price Sony asks rather than whining about Sony's exclusivity?
It's kind of like signing a temperance pledge because practically everybody else in my community has VD, and subsequently being told that if I want to watch a movie I have to have sex in the back row of it. Am I a whiner because I refuse?
And how about you?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Various Unix's? Are M$ trying not to mention a competitor on their website? Yes it was a 2 tier system - as mentioned, the frontend was apache on BSD, the backend was Solaris on Sun boxes, oh and they were trying to switch to NT since aquiring hotmail in '97: here's an article from '98. They only managed to move to Win 2k in 2000.
Haydn.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
So? They do work, you know.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Microsoft is the only place I've every worked that hired other engineers remove the ongoing responsibility of performance and debug from development engineers. They should require that a developer has to maintain whatever they work on for at least a year after release.
Pardon me if I think you're lying through your teeth. How could they not notice that they're no longer connecting to a Windows server? They would still have to connect via FTP or something other protocol, did you spoof those too? Not just that, how did you manage to fake the whole directory tree? If they connect to upload files, they'd notice it was a unix system by the file hierarchy and the fact that ASP DIDN'T WORK ANYMORE. Yes, there are some *nix ASP products, but they don't work that well. They'd definitely notice something was wrong the second they tried changing something on the website.