[geeks] my head just went explodey

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 @ 16:25 -0500, Bill Bradford said:

> On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 08:56:38PM +0100, Mike Meredith wrote:
> > Could it be that there is money involved ? Application server vendor A
> > bribes application vendor B into only supporting their application
> > server. Repeat for C and D, and so forth. We end up not just supporting
> > one festering pile of shit that falls over at the slightest prod, but a
> > whole fleet of the buggers.
> 
> You should see the stuff I had to support at $WORK-1.  Telco SLA record
> keeping database.  Java/Tomcat/etc, using SNMP, talking to Oracle.
> 
> "Oh?  its slow?  Throw a bigger machine and more RAM at it!"  (this was
> a dual-300Mhz Sun E250 with 2G of RAM and hardware RAID..)

Years ago I evaluated a project by Digital Creations (the guys
behind Zope), that did classified ads.  I was working for InfiNet
(www.infi.net) at the time (1995-1998).

The program was a classified ads program for real estate listings.  It
allowed users to manage ads, and it would search for and display ads to
people visiting.  It used a persistent store to make things faster, but
since it never worked right, it used tons of memory and was slow.  It
also had severe memory leaks, even beyond those Python itself had.

On the test database, which was a fraction of what reality would be, it
used 250MB of memory.  This was in 1998, and that was "somewhat large"
for a WWW program then (being quite gracious).

My report to management was pretty simple: "Don't bother with this
product, it is buggy, bloated, and poorly designed, and a lot of our
users hate it."

Naturally, they used it.  Of course, long before it ever ran
successfully for more than five minutes, marketing had already sold it.

Real production use was worse than even I had imagined.  In order to
keep this bloated program from dying, a then-current DEC Alphaserver had
to be upgraded to 8GB of main memory, and 11GB of swap space.

Continuous banging away at the code made it work, and they were stuck
with it because customers started depending on it (though some were
forced into the deal because our parent companies owned them).

I'm fairly certain I can boast that I have seen the worst written, most
bloated WWW application in world history.

Or has someone else seen something worse?



-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["All of us get lost in the darkness,
dreamers turn to look at the stars" -- Rush ]