Unexpected Bug Causation
Feb. 24th, 2006 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurWell, that's one of the more amusing theories I've heard lately.
One of our customers runs very heavy A/V out of his house using our software -- he runs big seminars all day, every day, using audio, video, screen-sharing -- the works. All of this has worked quite well until the past week or so, when things suddenly got far glitchier for him, with all sorts of connectivity problems appearing. We've more or less determined that it's a network problem: he's doing all this over a cable modem, so it's not *completely* surprising that his connectivity is less reliable than one would expect from, say, a T1 line. But we couldn't figure out what had changed to cause the problems this week.
And then the customer-service rep who's been working with him pointed out that it's school vacation week. Hordes of teenagers, out of school, playing games over the net, running torrents, and generally stressing the heck out of that poor shared-line cable system.
Don't know if that's actually what happened, but it's painfully plausible...
One of our customers runs very heavy A/V out of his house using our software -- he runs big seminars all day, every day, using audio, video, screen-sharing -- the works. All of this has worked quite well until the past week or so, when things suddenly got far glitchier for him, with all sorts of connectivity problems appearing. We've more or less determined that it's a network problem: he's doing all this over a cable modem, so it's not *completely* surprising that his connectivity is less reliable than one would expect from, say, a T1 line. But we couldn't figure out what had changed to cause the problems this week.
And then the customer-service rep who's been working with him pointed out that it's school vacation week. Hordes of teenagers, out of school, playing games over the net, running torrents, and generally stressing the heck out of that poor shared-line cable system.
Don't know if that's actually what happened, but it's painfully plausible...
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-25 01:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-25 01:43 am (UTC)We had a major customer giving us grief because of poor audio quality and drop outs - which we couldn't reproduce.
Turns out they bought new unsupported hardware, and then used an unsupported Linux Kernel with a deprecated disk driver. And turned on native RAID support on the box when we don't support that.
It only took half our engineering staff much of the week to find all of it.
(Yeah, your customer is using a shared local network with High School kids.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-25 04:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-25 01:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-25 02:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-25 03:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-25 01:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-26 01:47 am (UTC)- Eric
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-26 04:33 am (UTC)Eventually we'll undoubtedly pull up to a more modern (and less sucky) version of ActionScript, but I suspect that that will be a dramatic project -- we'll probably drop the entire client and rewrite it, rather than trying to evolve our massive codebase to the new version of the language. Not really my area of expertise, though: I was originally the server engine developer, and I'm still only partially involved with the Flash client. Mostly my time there is focused on leveraging what we *can* get out of AS1; I haven't looked into the newer versions of the language much myself yet, although one of the other Architects has done quite a bit there...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-26 12:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-26 03:58 pm (UTC)The problem with the rewrite is that we basically have to say "We stop here and don't add any features for a while", so we can focus on rewriting the feature set we have; that's not an easy sell. I *suspect* that it'll happen for at least the meeting window in the not-too-distant future, since there are a lot of features waiting until we do the ground-up rewrite there. The console is less obvious: with the Salesforce integration, the console is gradually getting de-emphasized, so the motivation to spend a lot of time and effort fixing it is lower. (Which burns *my* butt, because I would really love to rewrite the communications layer in ActionScript 2. But I don't know if it's ever going to happen.)
And man -- you really should get yourself an LJ account. It makes it easier for folks to track comment threads, even if you don't bother posting stuff yourself here...