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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Again, what a nice way to push people to 64bit and make everything look outdated that's been in use so far, when all you'd need is a non-sucking OS.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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.