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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."
WMV? You serious?
How the hell am I supposed to watch that?
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
I suppose that, transitively, it is due to a limitation in an archaic version of the BSD stack.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
Hey, Microsoft has to eat their own dogfood if they want to keep some modicum of credibility no matter how bad the food tastes...
Is that not one of the most ironic things you've ever heard? The limitations of the operating system made by the same company holding back another division? Shock and awe.
Interviewer: "Hey dude."
Chris St.Amand "What up bro"
Interviewer: "So like what happened when you worked on microsoft.com? Oh but first...Did you get all the chicks at the bars when you mentioned your job or what?"
Chris St.Amand "Oh totally. I'd just say, 'what up babe. I work on the microsoft.com web portal' and she'd degfrag my harddrive all night."
Interviewer: "Sweet. So what was your biggest hurrdle writing all that HTML? After all that's a complicated langaguage to master."
Chris St.Amand "It'd definelty have to be that F'ing page not found shit. You don't know how many times I'd go to microsoft.com after doing a big update and it'd just say four-oh something and the page just wouldn't show up. You know we tried to put up a 420 page not found but got in trouble with our boss."
Interviewer: "Yea totally! That would have been cool. Oh ummm let's see here. So what other problems did you have?"
Chris St.Amand: "Not being able to use FreeBSD to serve that shit. When I first heard I actually had to use Microsoft I was completely like, 'Not cool Bill. Not F'ing cool, Bill.'
Interviewer: "Any thing else? Like was it hard to get up every day in the morning knowing that your existence was updating microsoft.com HTML?"
Chris St.Amand: "Yea I tried sucicide a number of times. But then I discovered that I could just completely make up new HTML tags and that was a lot of fun."
Interviewer: "Make up HTML?"
Chris St.Amand: "Oh yea, we're microsoft. When I first started they told me that no other browsers exist other then that big blue F'ing E and that no other operating systems exist. And that I could do whatever I wanted to do. So I just started making up *ALL KINDS* of crazy ass HTML.
Interviewer: "Cool dude. You rock. Anything else you want to mention?"
Chris St.Amand: "Yea you know all that crazy F'ed up HTML that all of our products output? You know without indention and messed up question marks everywhere? That was me. I was all hung over the day I added that. And that's about it."
Interviewer: Thanks Chris, I'm sure you'll go down in infamancy for such a piece of F'ing shit web page and end up in some lame ass 'Don't write web pages like this' hall of fame.
Chris St.Amand: "Peace out and remeber to eat your greens not smoke 'em!"
They should be redesigned.
That's a big problem of software made by companys:
1 - The company's cashflow is based arround selling new versions of the software
2 - They can't sell to it's customers improvements that they customers can't see
3 - There is a fixed time that can go by beetween one release and the next one
4 - Resources are limited
Because of this, a major redesign is something that won't be profitable, because only the advanced users will note the changes, but 99% of their customers won't, so the software won't sell well. Bug fixes also won't sell, because they are also unvisible to the naked eye of the majority of the userbase, and also customers expect those changes to be free.
So, some companys only can expect revenue from a given software once a year, and they have to invest into that software, a given set of limited resources over, say, 6 months, when they have to freeze the featureset so they can start debugging. Seeing which things sell, they will obviously focus their atention on: New Features, and a nicer GUI.
OTH, a project that doesn't have a company running it, can just get out lots of upgrades, when needed, and focus their time on making the software better, even if some of the changes made to the software won't be seen by most of it's users.
With software prices dropping, and Free Software proving to be a better option, the budget of software companys will be even more limited, and we won't see this situation changing anytime soon.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Am I the only one who looked at the title and thought: "debug microsoft.com? Who still uses .com files any more?"
Yup, thought so. I suck.
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
According to microsoft, the MSN messenger service (which serves to around 70 million people) used to run on 250 32-bit servers, and now it runs on just 25 or something like that... (apparently one of the big reasons was the limit on the number of tcp connections).
It's quite amazing to think that a service as huge as messenger can run on just 25 servers!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
IIS just can't hold up by itself, if you just serve static pages you are ok, but when people starts using that asp + odbc shit, you have to restart IIS every 5 fucking minutes.
That's not because of IIS; it's because of the people writing the ASP apps and stupid admins not configuring IIS correctly. If you have stupid people writing applications, those applications have a tendency of doing stupid things. Combine that with admins who don't properly isolate that applications running on IIS and you've got a recipe for requiring an IIS restart "every 5 fucking minutes".
Give me 5 minutes and I can write a nice app that takes down Apache no problem. A few infinite loops, perhaps each creating a dozen new database connections and allocating a massive string buffer in memory.
IIS 6.0 has a lot of features built into it that allow for admins to configure application pools to more effectively isolate applications. You can configure those application pools to recycle automatically given certain criteria (like memory usage, CPU usage, # req/sec, @ req/total, etc.), and the pools are isolated from each other so that if one dies due to a misbehaving application, the other applications on the system are not affected.
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, Yes, restart a SERVER.
Perhaps that's all you could do, but somebody who spent more than 10 minutes reading about administering IIS would know to recycle the ODBC COM+ application to clear out the connection pool. Then they would find the stupid people writing that crappy applications and fire them, or at least isolate their applications in a separate app pool or worker process. (Dllhost.exe.)
Spare me the anecdotal stories of your LAMP solutions doing so much better than your Windows solutions. You have absolutely no credibility given your complete ignorance.
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.
Heh, if you had to pay those MSFT licensing fees, I'm sure you'd find a way to reduce the number of Windows Servers you used too. ;)
At around 10:25 in the video Chris St. Amand, who runs Microsoft's website and data center, types in his password, which the camera recorded. And the video is hosted off of Microsoft's website...although I don't know how long that'll still be operational.