Debugging Microsoft.com 511
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."
10Mbits/s? really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Design flows shoudln't get patched ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
URLs always change (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Recycling processes is normal for windows (Score:4, Interesting)
The GNU/Linux servers were the ones with more hits, and the ones that required less atention. The windows servers were a pandora box of problems. 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. 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. That's about the worse thing a sysadmin can go through, the panic of not knowing if that crappy windows was going to come back up or not. OTH, our GNU/Linux machines with sites running a variety of CGI apps (PHP, Perl, etc), all using MySQL, supported 5 times the load on the windows machines without complaining, and i'm talking about 300 sites on simple x86 hardware, less powerfull than the one on the windows machines, that died with less than 100 sites
Re:Not just Windows stack limitations (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an interesting and powerful technology, however the general concept isn't new. More importantly it's not overcoming limitations in TCP, only limitations in the PC architecture and in OS implementations of TCP.
MS may be proposing changes to TCP to boost performance, but they don't seem to be covered by the article you are linking. In addition, TCP/IP implementations based on the improvements in various RFC's is perfectly capable of multi-gigabit throughput. I seem to remember reading a slashdot article about Internet 2 researchers seeing sustained long distance transfer rates over FTP (which is usually TCP based) that approached 100 Gb/s.
An example of the advantages of the new windows... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's quite amazing to think that a service as huge as messenger can run on just 25 servers!
Struggling beyond 10Mbit/s? (Score:3, Interesting)
I look at Solaris (err, OpenSolaris) and how it can now push a 10Gb/s interface at line speed [sun.com] (or close to it) and MS has struggled up until recently to get satisfactory speeds above 10Mbit/s ?
Yet another "how do users/admins accept this as OK" thought going through my head re: Windows internals.
Remember Hotmail? (Score:5, Interesting)
The following is just hearsay, as I've never actually worked for MS. But a couple of engineer buddies I used to work with did some subcontracting for MS, and they said they deployed a whole lot of internal-facing *nix servers during that period. I tend to believe it, because the MS security guys who taught some seminars I attended wouldn't confirm or deny that they used any Linux internally. If they could have denied it in clean conscience, wouldn't they have done so emphatically?
Re:Recycling processes is normal for windows (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:10Mbits/s? really? (Score:1, Interesting)
This is true with OS9 and a lot of OSX boxes it seems.
Re:Struggling beyond 10Mbit/s? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem was connecting two datacenters that were physically seperated by a long distance but connected with a high bandwidth pipe... the TCP protocol has problems with this because of latency issues.
Read this [microsoft.com] to see how they solved it.
Reminds me of the old days (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, "old technology" couldn't do anything better than new stuff like NT right? Come to think of it, there's not a LOT of difference between XP's kernel and NT's from what I understand... a few bug fixes here and there... but basically, it uses the same vulnerable messaging scheme and drivers running at ring-0 and all that.
Re:Reminds me of the old days (Score:3, Interesting)
Drivers generally run in kernel mode in Linux, and most other operating systems for that matter. One of the few that doesn't is QNX.
In any case, the kernel of Windows has been the slowest moving piece of the platform - because it's a very good kernel. It's a mix of performance of reliability that actually exemplifies a lot of great design techniques (BTW: you should have gone for the gold and mentioned VMS).
Re:What the... (Score:3, Interesting)
What I mean is, nothing aside from his own principles stop him from using a Windows PC to watch the video Nice to know that people of proincple don't use Windows :-)
BTW - this is the SAME company that wants everyone to standardize on their bullshit MS-XML, and lies about how they "won't" sue anyone, when they've already laid the groundwork to do exactly that with 6 loopholes in their bs covenant.
How do you tell if a Microsoftie is lieing?
Balmer's lips are moving.
Re:Struggling beyond 10Mbit/s? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or are you just replying to the 3 sentance summary without any information or knowing what you're talking about?
Microsoft's problems were with the TCP specifications, which they adhered to TOO closely. From the paper, NOT specific to windows (specific to any fully compliant TCP implementation), "under a 10GBPS link with 100ms delay, it will take roughly one hour for a standard TCP flow to fully utilize the link capacity".
This is due to how TCP is written to share the connection and not swamp it. MS provided a "workaround" for doing single, highspeed data transfers with high latency.
Even their video content has security flaws (Score:2, Interesting)
Especially with a little help [slashdot.org] from our friends from UC-Berkley.
Also, I like 12:32, "so we'll avoid showing ip address... haha we'll have to cut that part out..." like the large 207.46.16.30 address looking at us in the face and then seconds later the 3 ip addresses in clear view on the right.
"So we have terminal server access to all the servers in the data center, right.". Right, well I wonder how may of those servers, whose IP addresses we just saw, are attached to Chris's login and password?
Ready, aim, proxy.
Re:What the... (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't have to. You can always convert it to another format, even if you can only do it in a fraction of realtime.
Do people say you can't watch a video, just because it's downloading to slowly to be streamed in realtime?
Re:Easy. (Score:3, Interesting)
The only way to run them would be through an x86 emulator, which would probably be way too slow to result in actual watchable video.