Links for August 20th
- Machinist: How a million Windows users killed Skype
Windows Update = milions of reboots = trigger of deep bug in Skype’s peer-to-peer system. Fascinating real-world example of the limits of software reliability.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I'm a writer, editor and Web site builder. These days I'm working on MediaBugs. My new book is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters, now available from your preferred bookseller. I was co-founder of Salon, where I served as technology editor and later managing editor and VP/editorial operations for many years. I'm also author of the book Dreaming in Code.
 
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August 21st, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Yeah, and when the servers go down that track the users, everyone is trying to access them at once so you can’t even go back up because you’re essentially getting DDOS’d legit. While the causes are usually different and unique, the symptoms described are quite common. Not common to one particular app, but overall. It’s not new.
In fact, I’ve never met any programmer (who writes network code) that wasn’t aware of it. The excuse is usually that by the time you do have any chance of this happening, you’ll be in a position to fix and solve it. It’s just too costly to solve at first because the problem can’t really happen at that stage.