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Re:The Suez Canal will be widened by masklinn on Sunday May 16, 2021 @08:58AM (#27173396)
> When your program OOMs, you have three options:

The issue with your analogy is that here the "program" did not OOM as part of normal operations, instead it OOM'd because of a rare condition you can't really avoid (even calling it a bug is debatable, as a bug implies misbehaviour in the canal).

In that case, increasing your safety buffer so you can recover before swapping to death or the OOM killer -9-ing programs left and right is a good idea.

> - You can make the program handle the too-large-data case better. This requires deeper systemic changes usually across multiple components (the program, your monitoring and error reporting, upstream and downstream integrations). But this also tends to have knock-on improvements across the system.

How would you make "the program" handle "the too-large case better" exactly? As in, how would the canal handle a ship getting stuck sideways after having lost propulsion save by being wider than the ship can be long?

> And a lot of times it's cheaper than the first option when you compare total rather than marginal cost.

We're talking about a 200km canal.

> Why fuss over 131x10 feet and not the fact your only recovery plan is one excavator and a handful of tugboats?

Maybe they're working on both but increasing the canal width to provide more buffer in case of rare issues is a much more complicated and thus interesting thing, and thus gets more visibility?

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