Re:Drgn: How the Linux kernel team at Facebook debugs the ke...
by dexen on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @06:54AM
(#29550684)
>"won't fix, we just reboot servers when they crash"
>understanding dark magic
That is the original Unix black magic: KISS and do the simplest possible thing that works and when in doubt use brute force and so forth. That is the "C" language of infrastructure.
In the particular in the scenario we're discussing, there's always a pool of several servers ready to handle a HTTP request (or DB query, or multimedia transformation, etc.). Rebooting a small % of this pool, rather than debugging every single memory leak is a pragmatic, cost-effective solution. "Zero bugs" is a very abstract and detached goal; "cost effectiveness" is a very realistic and wholesome goal.
>understanding dark magic
That is the original Unix black magic: KISS and do the simplest possible thing that works and when in doubt use brute force and so forth. That is the "C" language of infrastructure.
In the particular in the scenario we're discussing, there's always a pool of several servers ready to handle a HTTP request (or DB query, or multimedia transformation, etc.). Rebooting a small % of this pool, rather than debugging every single memory leak is a pragmatic, cost-effective solution. "Zero bugs" is a very abstract and detached goal; "cost effectiveness" is a very realistic and wholesome goal.