The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread

tigger

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

Not that I’d do it but, it must be satisfying to leave a company, publicly name and slam your boss as incompetent and have it go to the top of Hacker News.

Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn’t leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn’t even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to “handle” her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.

Hixie's Natural Log

Per linkedin, Jeanine Banks is a serial VP. 2-3 years in a company, then move to another company, ideally to a slightly better position. She’ll be gone from Google in a year, as she already stayed more than 2. These people are the cancer of at least the tech sector but I suspect wider industry. They carry no knowledge, they have no vision, they never built anything, they never constructively worked with their reports. They don’t even do the work they are supposed to, they are just doing the bare minimum while expanding their social circles to land another similar position at a different company.

How can they actually get hired if they are useless? The whole ecosystem is full of them, and they hire people like themselves, because those people help them extend their social circles and move on. Their only saving grace is that they are often not evil people and don’t touch what they don’t understand.

Lob12

She is a black women in tech, you bunch of racises!

I just signed in to linked in. What a headache inducing website. Was directed via popup to two messages from 2015/2016 that I hadn’t read so I guess that’s when I last used it.

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

Not that I’d do it but, it must be satisfying to leave a company, publicly name and slam your boss as incompetent and have it go to the top of Hacker News.

Reminds me of a three month contract I had in maybe ~~2005~~ 1995 or so. My boss there was the worst I’d ever had. Really nice guy but hella neurotic. He’d not only regularly hover over your shoulder while you worked, he’d call out keystrokes for you to type in (can’t make this shit up). Anyway, despite the crazy, I kicked some goals while I was there and after my contract was up they wanted to renew. I wasn’t going to say “no way, Klaus is fucking crazy” so I agreed to renew if they doubled my daily rate. I knew there was no way they could get over the psychological barrier of paying me double what they had up until then and, sure enough, they let me go and I didn’t have to shit on anyone.

Kilemall

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

Not that I’d do it but, it must be satisfying to leave a company, publicly name and slam your boss as incompetent and have it go to the top of Hacker News.

Reminds me of a three month contract I had in maybe ~~2005~~ 1995 or so. My boss there was the worst I’d ever had. Really nice guy but hella neurotic. He’d not only regularly hover over your shoulder while you worked, he’d call out keystrokes for you to type in (can’t make this shit up). Anyway, despite the crazy, I kicked some goals while I was there and after my contract was up they wanted to renew. I wasn’t going to say “no way, Klaus is fucking crazy” so I agreed to renew if they doubled my daily rate. I knew there was no way they could get over the psychological barrier of paying me double what they had up until then and, sure enough, they let me go and I didn’t have to shit on anyone.

Railway Express Agency was the train era equivalent of UPS/FedEx. They were a monopoly and had an exemption with the caveat that they couldn’t turn down ANY shipment.

So they would try to say no by pricing the shipment so high the shipper would be dissuaded.

A woman I knew from high school went into banking and would say no to a loan by quoting too high rates.

Gators1

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

Not that I’d do it but, it must be satisfying to leave a company, publicly name and slam your boss as incompetent and have it go to the top of Hacker News.

Reminds me of a three month contract I had in maybe ~~2005~~ 1995 or so. My boss there was the worst I’d ever had. Really nice guy but hella neurotic. He’d not only regularly hover over your shoulder while you worked, he’d call out keystrokes for you to type in (can’t make this shit up). Anyway, despite the crazy, I kicked some goals while I was there and after my contract was up they wanted to renew. I wasn’t going to say “no way, Klaus is fucking crazy” so I agreed to renew if they doubled my daily rate. I knew there was no way they could get over the psychological barrier of paying me double what they had up until then and, sure enough, they let me go and I didn’t have to shit on anyone.

Railway Express Agency was the train era equivalent of UPS/FedEx. They were a monopoly and had an exemption with the caveat that they couldn’t turn down ANY shipment.

So they would try to say no by pricing the shipment so high the shipper would be dissuaded.

A woman I knew from high school went into banking and would say no to a loan by quoting too high rates.

Foamer thread!!!

Gators1

https://themessenger.com/tech/openai-sam-altman-helen-toner-reserach-paper-artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-chatbot

Kilemall

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

Not that I’d do it but, it must be satisfying to leave a company, publicly name and slam your boss as incompetent and have it go to the top of Hacker News.

Reminds me of a three month contract I had in maybe ~~2005~~ 1995 or so. My boss there was the worst I’d ever had. Really nice guy but hella neurotic. He’d not only regularly hover over your shoulder while you worked, he’d call out keystrokes for you to type in (can’t make this shit up). Anyway, despite the crazy, I kicked some goals while I was there and after my contract was up they wanted to renew. I wasn’t going to say “no way, Klaus is fucking crazy” so I agreed to renew if they doubled my daily rate. I knew there was no way they could get over the psychological barrier of paying me double what they had up until then and, sure enough, they let me go and I didn’t have to shit on anyone.

Railway Express Agency was the train era equivalent of UPS/FedEx. They were a monopoly and had an exemption with the caveat that they couldn’t turn down ANY shipment.

So they would try to say no by pricing the shipment so high the shipper would be dissuaded.

A woman I knew from high school went into banking and would say no to a loan by quoting too high rates.

Foamer thread!!!

Fear of history! Sad!

Gators1

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

Not that I’d do it but, it must be satisfying to leave a company, publicly name and slam your boss as incompetent and have it go to the top of Hacker News.

Reminds me of a three month contract I had in maybe ~~2005~~ 1995 or so. My boss there was the worst I’d ever had. Really nice guy but hella neurotic. He’d not only regularly hover over your shoulder while you worked, he’d call out keystrokes for you to type in (can’t make this shit up). Anyway, despite the crazy, I kicked some goals while I was there and after my contract was up they wanted to renew. I wasn’t going to say “no way, Klaus is fucking crazy” so I agreed to renew if they doubled my daily rate. I knew there was no way they could get over the psychological barrier of paying me double what they had up until then and, sure enough, they let me go and I didn’t have to shit on anyone.

Railway Express Agency was the train era equivalent of UPS/FedEx. They were a monopoly and had an exemption with the caveat that they couldn’t turn down ANY shipment.

So they would try to say no by pricing the shipment so high the shipper would be dissuaded.

A woman I knew from high school went into banking and would say no to a loan by quoting too high rates.

Foamer thread!!!

Fear of history! Sad!

Many bad things happened in history. Noah’s flood, Ghengis Kahn, Holocaust…

Unity's 1.6 BILLION Dollar Mistake

275 kiwis are now out of work because John Riccitiello paid 1.6 billion dollars for an albatross. He already stepped down a month or two ago over the unity license agreement reneging debacle and I wonder where he’ll end up next. Him being forced to resign over poor performance at EA didn’t stop him from getting the Unity gig.

Gators1

@Hog with our luck he will buy LOT from Lithu and then use our subscription fees to buy some commie or European forum and merge them.

One of our servers, probably the main server for most business functions, has 5 terabytes of RAM and is otherwise configured up the wazoo with the most premium disk and CPUs that Azure has to offer.

It runs like shit. It’s always run like shit but we had a software version upgrade and now it’s often unusable. Some of the business functions that used to take 10 minutes (but should have been much less) can take hours now and it’s affecting production.

There’s a 24/7 bridge call set up for the crisis that I get sucked into occasionally that occasionally produces actions like*Hog, explain why this complex application that you’ve never seen before today and is slow and report back in an hour with your recommendations". And they’ll hassle you for updates exactly within the hour if you haven’t reported back because you don’t understand wtf the app is doing functionally let alone technically…

A couple of times it’s looked like I’m going to have to rewrite whole apps or re-architect others while the business bleeds and IT management drums their fingers and hovers over my shoulders.

Thankfully it seems that the penny has dropped that it’s not an app specific problem but something wrong with the system. I’m hearing things like some process or other trying to use 50 gigabytes of cache that’s only been configured to allow 5 megabytes.

Of course, I’m not counting on that so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the apps and processes I might have to rewrite at no notice.

Fuck me, IT is stressful sometimes. I have some talents but one of them isn’t thinking well and understanding stuff under extreme time pressure.

Kilemall

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

One of our servers, probably the main server for most business functions, has 5 terabytes of RAM and is otherwise configured up the wazoo with the most premium disk and CPUs that Azure has to offer.

It runs like shit. It’s always run like shit but we had a software version upgrade and now it’s often unusable. Some of the business functions that used to take 10 minutes (but should have been much less) can take hours now and it’s affecting production.

There’s a 24/7 bridge call set up for the crisis that I get sucked into occasionally that occasionally produces actions like*Hog, explain why this complex application that you’ve never seen before today and is slow and report back in an hour with your recommendations". And they’ll hassle you for updates exactly within the hour if you haven’t reported back because you don’t understand wtf the app is doing functionally let alone technically…

A couple of times it’s looked like I’m going to have to rewrite whole apps or re-architect others while the business bleeds and IT management drums their fingers and hovers over my shoulders.

Thankfully it seems that the penny has dropped that it’s not an app specific problem but something wrong with the system. I’m hearing things like some process or other trying to use 50 gigabytes of cache that’s only been configured to allow 5 megabytes.

Of course, I’m not counting on that so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the apps and processes I might have to rewrite at no notice.

Fuck me, IT is stressful sometimes. I have some talents but one of them isn’t thinking well and understanding stuff under extreme time pressure.

I just dealt with a server hang that unlike most of ours actually affects patient care. You could have that pressure.

Anything with 5 TB of memory is either a supercomputer modeling climate or Mach 25 missiles, is a central Google AI, or is badly configured and Microsoft is enjoying charging rental on the moron designing the thing.

I’m guessing the latter.

tigger

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

One of our servers, probably the main server for most business functions, has 5 terabytes of RAM and is otherwise configured up the wazoo with the most premium disk and CPUs that Azure has to offer.

It runs like shit. It’s always run like shit but we had a software version upgrade and now it’s often unusable. Some of the business functions that used to take 10 minutes (but should have been much less) can take hours now and it’s affecting production.

There’s a 24/7 bridge call set up for the crisis that I get sucked into occasionally that occasionally produces actions like*Hog, explain why this complex application that you’ve never seen before today and is slow and report back in an hour with your recommendations". And they’ll hassle you for updates exactly within the hour if you haven’t reported back because you don’t understand wtf the app is doing functionally let alone technically…

A couple of times it’s looked like I’m going to have to rewrite whole apps or re-architect others while the business bleeds and IT management drums their fingers and hovers over my shoulders.

Thankfully it seems that the penny has dropped that it’s not an app specific problem but something wrong with the system. I’m hearing things like some process or other trying to use 50 gigabytes of cache that’s only been configured to allow 5 megabytes.

Of course, I’m not counting on that so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the apps and processes I might have to rewrite at no notice.

Fuck me, IT is stressful sometimes. I have some talents but one of them isn’t thinking well and understanding stuff under extreme time pressure.

I just dealt with a server hang that unlike most of ours actually affects patient care. You could have that pressure.

Anything with 5 TB of memory is either a supercomputer modeling climate or Mach 25 missiles, is a central Google AI, or is badly configured and Microsoft is enjoying charging rental on the moron designing the thing.

I’m guessing the latter.

Welcome to 2005 ;)

Kilemall

@tigger said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

One of our servers, probably the main server for most business functions, has 5 terabytes of RAM and is otherwise configured up the wazoo with the most premium disk and CPUs that Azure has to offer.

It runs like shit. It’s always run like shit but we had a software version upgrade and now it’s often unusable. Some of the business functions that used to take 10 minutes (but should have been much less) can take hours now and it’s affecting production.

There’s a 24/7 bridge call set up for the crisis that I get sucked into occasionally that occasionally produces actions like*Hog, explain why this complex application that you’ve never seen before today and is slow and report back in an hour with your recommendations". And they’ll hassle you for updates exactly within the hour if you haven’t reported back because you don’t understand wtf the app is doing functionally let alone technically…

A couple of times it’s looked like I’m going to have to rewrite whole apps or re-architect others while the business bleeds and IT management drums their fingers and hovers over my shoulders.

Thankfully it seems that the penny has dropped that it’s not an app specific problem but something wrong with the system. I’m hearing things like some process or other trying to use 50 gigabytes of cache that’s only been configured to allow 5 megabytes.

Of course, I’m not counting on that so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the apps and processes I might have to rewrite at no notice.

Fuck me, IT is stressful sometimes. I have some talents but one of them isn’t thinking well and understanding stuff under extreme time pressure.

I just dealt with a server hang that unlike most of ours actually affects patient care. You could have that pressure.

Anything with 5 TB of memory is either a supercomputer modeling climate or Mach 25 missiles, is a central Google AI, or is badly configured and Microsoft is enjoying charging rental on the moron designing the thing.

I’m guessing the latter.

Welcome to 2005 ;)

Hmm, our virtual servers probably have that but not the individual carved ones. Mainframes do similar workloads to Unix or windows business machines but with a lot less memory due to superior I/O.

Storage is Petabytes, but I haven’t heard of petabyte memory.

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

One of our servers, probably the main server for most business functions, has 5 terabytes of RAM and is otherwise configured up the wazoo with the most premium disk and CPUs that Azure has to offer.

It runs like shit. It’s always run like shit but we had a software version upgrade and now it’s often unusable. Some of the business functions that used to take 10 minutes (but should have been much less) can take hours now and it’s affecting production.

There’s a 24/7 bridge call set up for the crisis that I get sucked into occasionally that occasionally produces actions like*Hog, explain why this complex application that you’ve never seen before today and is slow and report back in an hour with your recommendations". And they’ll hassle you for updates exactly within the hour if you haven’t reported back because you don’t understand wtf the app is doing functionally let alone technically…

A couple of times it’s looked like I’m going to have to rewrite whole apps or re-architect others while the business bleeds and IT management drums their fingers and hovers over my shoulders.

Thankfully it seems that the penny has dropped that it’s not an app specific problem but something wrong with the system. I’m hearing things like some process or other trying to use 50 gigabytes of cache that’s only been configured to allow 5 megabytes.

Of course, I’m not counting on that so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the apps and processes I might have to rewrite at no notice.

Fuck me, IT is stressful sometimes. I have some talents but one of them isn’t thinking well and understanding stuff under extreme time pressure.

I just dealt with a server hang that unlike most of ours actually affects patient care. You could have that pressure.

Anything with 5 TB of memory is either a supercomputer modeling climate or Mach 25 missiles, is a central Google AI, or is badly configured and Microsoft is enjoying charging rental on the moron designing the thing.

I’m guessing the latter.

The whole ERP + is run on an in-memory database. I only found out about the 5 terabyte RAM figure when I asked the obvious question yesterday, “Has anyone discussed upgrading the machine?” That’s when I was told it was already way above spec. It’s a big company with a lot of data but I asked Bard what was typical for large companies using that product and it said one to two terabytes of RAM. I don’t know if we just have more data or just don’t know how to configure it. I did see one of the external support consultants from the vendor post a screenshot of Azure pricing in the bridge chat so maybe we’re going to give it even more :)

(But seriously, I doubt we’re going to add more RAM - I didn’t read actually read the context of the post).

Gators1

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@tigger said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

One of our servers, probably the main server for most business functions, has 5 terabytes of RAM and is otherwise configured up the wazoo with the most premium disk and CPUs that Azure has to offer.

It runs like shit. It’s always run like shit but we had a software version upgrade and now it’s often unusable. Some of the business functions that used to take 10 minutes (but should have been much less) can take hours now and it’s affecting production.

There’s a 24/7 bridge call set up for the crisis that I get sucked into occasionally that occasionally produces actions like*Hog, explain why this complex application that you’ve never seen before today and is slow and report back in an hour with your recommendations". And they’ll hassle you for updates exactly within the hour if you haven’t reported back because you don’t understand wtf the app is doing functionally let alone technically…

A couple of times it’s looked like I’m going to have to rewrite whole apps or re-architect others while the business bleeds and IT management drums their fingers and hovers over my shoulders.

Thankfully it seems that the penny has dropped that it’s not an app specific problem but something wrong with the system. I’m hearing things like some process or other trying to use 50 gigabytes of cache that’s only been configured to allow 5 megabytes.

Of course, I’m not counting on that so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the apps and processes I might have to rewrite at no notice.

Fuck me, IT is stressful sometimes. I have some talents but one of them isn’t thinking well and understanding stuff under extreme time pressure.

I just dealt with a server hang that unlike most of ours actually affects patient care. You could have that pressure.

Anything with 5 TB of memory is either a supercomputer modeling climate or Mach 25 missiles, is a central Google AI, or is badly configured and Microsoft is enjoying charging rental on the moron designing the thing.

I’m guessing the latter.

Welcome to 2005 ;)

Hmm, our virtual servers probably have that but not the individual carved ones. Mainframes do similar workloads to Unix or windows business machines but with a lot less memory due to superior I/O.

Storage is Petabytes, but I haven’t heard of petabyte memory.

Any cache database is gonna want a lot of memory. Guessing AWS has a bunch of those for their products and large businesses concerned with latency in delivering stuff on the internetz.

Gators1

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

One of our servers, probably the main server for most business functions, has 5 terabytes of RAM and is otherwise configured up the wazoo with the most premium disk and CPUs that Azure has to offer.

It runs like shit. It’s always run like shit but we had a software version upgrade and now it’s often unusable. Some of the business functions that used to take 10 minutes (but should have been much less) can take hours now and it’s affecting production.

There’s a 24/7 bridge call set up for the crisis that I get sucked into occasionally that occasionally produces actions like*Hog, explain why this complex application that you’ve never seen before today and is slow and report back in an hour with your recommendations". And they’ll hassle you for updates exactly within the hour if you haven’t reported back because you don’t understand wtf the app is doing functionally let alone technically…

A couple of times it’s looked like I’m going to have to rewrite whole apps or re-architect others while the business bleeds and IT management drums their fingers and hovers over my shoulders.

Thankfully it seems that the penny has dropped that it’s not an app specific problem but something wrong with the system. I’m hearing things like some process or other trying to use 50 gigabytes of cache that’s only been configured to allow 5 megabytes.

Of course, I’m not counting on that so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the apps and processes I might have to rewrite at no notice.

Fuck me, IT is stressful sometimes. I have some talents but one of them isn’t thinking well and understanding stuff under extreme time pressure.

I just dealt with a server hang that unlike most of ours actually affects patient care. You could have that pressure.

Anything with 5 TB of memory is either a supercomputer modeling climate or Mach 25 missiles, is a central Google AI, or is badly configured and Microsoft is enjoying charging rental on the moron designing the thing.

I’m guessing the latter.

The whole ERP + is run on an in-memory database. I only found out about the 5 terabyte RAM figure when I asked the obvious question yesterday, “Has anyone discussed upgrading the machine?” That’s when I was told it was already way above spec. It’s a big company with a lot of data but I asked Bard what was typical for large companies using that product and it said one to two terabytes of RAM. I don’t know if we just have more data or just don’t know how to configure it. I did see one of the external support consultants from the vendor post a screenshot of Azure pricing in the bridge chat so maybe we’re going to give it even more :)

(But seriously, I doubt we’re going to add more RAM - I didn’t read actually read the context of the post).

Did you ever ask them why they are asking an application developer to troubleshoot server configurations instead of someone that knows about that shit? And maybe get the networking assholes in the room too to see if they might be the bottleneck?

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

One of our servers, probably the main server for most business functions, has 5 terabytes of RAM and is otherwise configured up the wazoo with the most premium disk and CPUs that Azure has to offer.

It runs like shit. It’s always run like shit but we had a software version upgrade and now it’s often unusable. Some of the business functions that used to take 10 minutes (but should have been much less) can take hours now and it’s affecting production.

There’s a 24/7 bridge call set up for the crisis that I get sucked into occasionally that occasionally produces actions like*Hog, explain why this complex application that you’ve never seen before today and is slow and report back in an hour with your recommendations". And they’ll hassle you for updates exactly within the hour if you haven’t reported back because you don’t understand wtf the app is doing functionally let alone technically…

A couple of times it’s looked like I’m going to have to rewrite whole apps or re-architect others while the business bleeds and IT management drums their fingers and hovers over my shoulders.

Thankfully it seems that the penny has dropped that it’s not an app specific problem but something wrong with the system. I’m hearing things like some process or other trying to use 50 gigabytes of cache that’s only been configured to allow 5 megabytes.

Of course, I’m not counting on that so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the apps and processes I might have to rewrite at no notice.

Fuck me, IT is stressful sometimes. I have some talents but one of them isn’t thinking well and understanding stuff under extreme time pressure.

I just dealt with a server hang that unlike most of ours actually affects patient care. You could have that pressure.

Anything with 5 TB of memory is either a supercomputer modeling climate or Mach 25 missiles, is a central Google AI, or is badly configured and Microsoft is enjoying charging rental on the moron designing the thing.

I’m guessing the latter.

The whole ERP + is run on an in-memory database. I only found out about the 5 terabyte RAM figure when I asked the obvious question yesterday, “Has anyone discussed upgrading the machine?” That’s when I was told it was already way above spec. It’s a big company with a lot of data but I asked Bard what was typical for large companies using that product and it said one to two terabytes of RAM. I don’t know if we just have more data or just don’t know how to configure it. I did see one of the external support consultants from the vendor post a screenshot of Azure pricing in the bridge chat so maybe we’re going to give it even more :)

(But seriously, I doubt we’re going to add more RAM - I didn’t read actually read the context of the post).

Did you ever ask them why they are asking an application developer to troubleshoot server configurations instead of someone that knows about that shit? And maybe get the networking assholes in the room too to see if they might be the bottleneck?

It’s a fair point but the users had been complaining generally about performance since the upgrade went live and the technical team that looks after performance had been repeating that, aside from the odd spike, the system was healthy.

Then one of the critical processes for production shat itself and the symptom was “user clicks this button and has to wait 2 to 5 minutes, then clicks this button and has to wait…” etc. Since that was the specific issue that got elevated to P2⁺ and I was nominated before the upgrade for 24/7 hypercare (all apps, not just the ones I’d worked on) I got roped in on the crisis team to fix the issue. I didn’t know all the context so I started with looking at what the app was doing.

⁺(I don’t think there is a P1 or I’ve never heard of it. I assume if it happens it means I should start looking for another job.)

Gators1

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL tech stuff thread:

One of our servers, probably the main server for most business functions, has 5 terabytes of RAM and is otherwise configured up the wazoo with the most premium disk and CPUs that Azure has to offer.

It runs like shit. It’s always run like shit but we had a software version upgrade and now it’s often unusable. Some of the business functions that used to take 10 minutes (but should have been much less) can take hours now and it’s affecting production.

There’s a 24/7 bridge call set up for the crisis that I get sucked into occasionally that occasionally produces actions like*Hog, explain why this complex application that you’ve never seen before today and is slow and report back in an hour with your recommendations". And they’ll hassle you for updates exactly within the hour if you haven’t reported back because you don’t understand wtf the app is doing functionally let alone technically…

A couple of times it’s looked like I’m going to have to rewrite whole apps or re-architect others while the business bleeds and IT management drums their fingers and hovers over my shoulders.

Thankfully it seems that the penny has dropped that it’s not an app specific problem but something wrong with the system. I’m hearing things like some process or other trying to use 50 gigabytes of cache that’s only been configured to allow 5 megabytes.

Of course, I’m not counting on that so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the apps and processes I might have to rewrite at no notice.

Fuck me, IT is stressful sometimes. I have some talents but one of them isn’t thinking well and understanding stuff under extreme time pressure.

I just dealt with a server hang that unlike most of ours actually affects patient care. You could have that pressure.

Anything with 5 TB of memory is either a supercomputer modeling climate or Mach 25 missiles, is a central Google AI, or is badly configured and Microsoft is enjoying charging rental on the moron designing the thing.

I’m guessing the latter.

The whole ERP + is run on an in-memory database. I only found out about the 5 terabyte RAM figure when I asked the obvious question yesterday, “Has anyone discussed upgrading the machine?” That’s when I was told it was already way above spec. It’s a big company with a lot of data but I asked Bard what was typical for large companies using that product and it said one to two terabytes of RAM. I don’t know if we just have more data or just don’t know how to configure it. I did see one of the external support consultants from the vendor post a screenshot of Azure pricing in the bridge chat so maybe we’re going to give it even more :)

(But seriously, I doubt we’re going to add more RAM - I didn’t read actually read the context of the post).

Did you ever ask them why they are asking an application developer to troubleshoot server configurations instead of someone that knows about that shit? And maybe get the networking assholes in the room too to see if they might be the bottleneck?

It’s a fair point but the users had been complaining generally about performance since the upgrade went live and the technical team that looks after performance had been repeating that, aside from the odd spike, the system was healthy.

Then one of the critical processes for production shat itself and the symptom was “user clicks this button and has to wait 2 to 5 minutes, then clicks this button and has to wait…” etc. Since that was the specific issue that got elevated to P2⁺ and I was nominated before the upgrade for 24/7 hypercare (all apps, not just the ones I’d worked on) I got roped in on the crisis team to fix the issue. I didn’t know all the context so I started with looking at what the app was doing.

⁺(I don’t think there is a P1 or I’ve never heard of it. I assume if it happens it means I should start looking for another job.)

Didn’t you say your contract was ending anyway? Also did you try rebooting?