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The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

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Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#41

Post by Pete_D »

olyjohn wrote: post #13
the-dude wrote: post #4

I have always thought about the shutdown crapfest as not being able to shutdown for like ... 25 reasons? I believe there is a KB entry somewhere listing a bunch of them. Almost impossible to troubleshoot ( network connections! )

Is it just me, or shouldn't an OS be able to kill it's own processes? When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Task Manager... don't even get me started. It feels like half the time when I try to end a process, it won't end. It'll hang up Task Manager or something else will freak out before you actually end a non-responsive process. This is why I feel Windows c…

For some very stubborn processes, I've had to resort to attaching to them using windbg.exe and killing it from there.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#42

Post by joshstrange »

agwa wrote: post #21
olyjohn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me, or shouldn't an OS be able to kill it's own processes? When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Task Manager... don't even get me started. It feels like half the time when I try to end a process, it won't end. It'll hang up Task Manager or something else will freak out before you actually end a non-responsive process. This is why I feel Windows c…

> When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Wrong. If a Linux process is blocked in an uninterruptible system call (typically for disk I/O), it cannot be killed, even with -9. I have been unable to cleanly shut down Linux systems in the past due to processes getting stuck in this state.

This 10000X over. I have an SSD that I have to assume is bad that had abyssal read/write speeds due to processes constantly getting stuck in state D when they touched it. It would bring the system to its knees with load averages 40+ while my 8c/16t CPU would be sitting there doing nothing.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#43

Post by pritambaral »

agwa wrote: post #21
olyjohn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me, or shouldn't an OS be able to kill it's own processes? When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Task Manager... don't even get me started. It feels like half the time when I try to end a process, it won't end. It'll hang up Task Manager or something else will freak out before you actually end a non-responsive process. This is why I feel Windows c…

> When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Wrong. If a Linux process is blocked in an uninterruptible system call (typically for disk I/O), it cannot be killed, even with -9. I have been unable to cleanly shut down Linux systems in the past due to processes getting stuck in this state.

`kill -9` on a process blocked on a syscall does kill the process, it just doesn't clean the process up. The result of SIGKILL-ing (i.e., killing with -9) a blocked process is a zombie process. Zombies are dead, right?

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#44

Post by pritambaral »

sevensor wrote: post #28
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why ssh? You have several virtual terminals available at Ctrl+Alt+F1/F2/etc. right?

That works sometimes, and when it works I can usually get X unstuck without a reboot. But sometimes X gets stuck in a way that makes me unable to switch to another virtual console. Then ssh becomes my only recourse, and the only way to kill X is to reboot. This has only happened to me on systems with nvidia graphics, although it doesn't seem to matter whether I'm using nouveau or proprietary drivers.

> But sometimes X gets stuck in a way that makes me unable to switch to another virtual console

This is the situation where I recommend the Magic-SysRq[0] keys. Alt+SysRq+r (on a system where /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq is configured) transfers keyboard control back to the kernel. There are other Magic-SysRq keys. My personal favourite is the one that invokes the OOMKiller; and there's one for remounting all filesystems read-only, and one for unconditionally rebooting the system.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#45

Post by cm2187 »

bradford wrote: post #10

I started at MS during Vista and I've been involved (sometimes tangentially) with Windows ever since. This is all my opinion, but It's been very interesting seeing the decision making process change over time. If I had to summarize the change, I'd say that it's evolved from an expertise-based system to a data based system. The reason why eight people were present at every planning meeting is because their expert opin…

Microsoft introduced a high level of non-opt-out telemetry. That's what is controversial more than the telemetry itself.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#46

Post by zyamada »

andrewfong wrote: post #32
bradford wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and, I might be misunderstanding your question, but I view that as a good thing. I don't ever want to spend my time in a meeting witnessing people bicker over where to position a dialog button, when you could just run an A/B test and let data guide the decision process.

Yes, but now you get to bicker about how to structure the A/B test and whether the results are statistically significant.

"Based on the data collected, most users seem to prefer..." is better than, "Based on my training and personal experiences, I think users would prefer..."

It is a lot easier to come to a common agreement on something as objective as statistical significance when compared to personal feelings and opinions.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#47

Post by pjc50 »

pritambaral wrote: post #43
agwa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Wrong. If a Linux process is blocked in an uninterruptible system call (typically for disk I/O), it cannot be killed, even with -9. I have been unable to cleanly shut down Linux systems in the past due to processes getting stuck in this state.

`kill -9` on a process blocked on a syscall does kill the process, it just doesn't clean the process up. The result of SIGKILL-ing (i.e., killing with -9) a blocked process is a zombie process. Zombies are dead, right?

With a suitably wedged NFS process I believe you can get a process that is stuck in D even if you `kill -9` it.

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#48

Post by wutbrodo »

mrguyorama wrote: post #17
olyjohn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me, or shouldn't an OS be able to kill it's own processes? When I kill -9 in Linux, the application is dead, gone... doesn't hang, doesn't sit there frozen. Task Manager... don't even get me started. It feels like half the time when I try to end a process, it won't end. It'll hang up Task Manager or something else will freak out before you actually end a non-responsive process. This is why I feel Windows c…

AFAIUI, Windows took the philosophy that the user should be the god of their system. By running software, the user has indicated to the OS that "This code is blessed and I want it to run". Where this becomes relevant is that when you shut down, Windows doesn't just kill -9 everything (which it is totally capable of doing), but instead, politely informs all running processes of the imminent shutdown so that they can c…

> AFAIUI, Windows took the philosophy that the user should be the god of their system. By running software, the user has indicated to the OS that "This code is blessed and I want it to run".

I really don't buy this. Aside from it being an incredibly dumb way of them to think that any process running was intentionally blessed by the user (have they _used_ a computer at any point in the last couple decades?), it's in direct conflict with the idea that they'll do things like restart your computer without your consent in order to install updates[1] (and of course, the restart takes several minutes due to the updates). My roommate and I were in the middle of a LAN Starcraft game in college and this happened. This was a trivial case that just meant our team lost the game, but there are far more serious situations in which taking a user's computer out of commission at an entirely arbitrary time could cause some serious damage. I can't imagine what kind of deranged lunatic at Microsoft thought this was an okay thing to do, and I can't fathom what kind of Stockholm Syndrome drives people to continue to use Windows when there's so many aggressively anti-user decisions like that peppered through the OS.

[1] All you have to do is click Postpone often enough when asked to install updates

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#49

Post by 0xbear »

Theodores wrote: post #20

I have decided to stick with writing code rather than progress my career. Consequently I am that minority in the team delivering features that customers use. I take personal pride in that and keep quiet about it. Those reports, those plans, the documentation, the mock ups, the meetings and the emails are not in the final product, all that work counted for next to nothing. Ultimately it was mostly two of us working aw…

You'll be out of a job by your mid-40's. I suggest you reconsider your decision to not "progress your career".

Re: The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

#50

Post by nxc18 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #35
feelin_googley wrote: post #33

"I was on the team responsible for improving performance for Outlook 98. Right after Outlook 97 shipped, my lead printed out every single function call made when Outlook started up. It was a stack of paper about a foot high. He spent about a week going through this printout with a highlighter, looking for "stupid shit", as he called it. Turned out, there was plenty of it. It further turned out that most of this "stup…

On the flip side, removing safety from MS Office devs has led to a pretty significant quality and security decline. Pretty much every Office version we upgrade to is tested to hell and back and we usually delay adoption for three years. By then its barely functional after three years of service packs and hotfixes. We just migrated 100 people to 2013 and are still finding issues. Worse, this mentality spread to update…

Microsoft fired a huge number of their SDETs (and they no longer actively recruit them). Since then, I've seen a huge decline in quality among office and windows. Devs will tell you they're just as good as testing as the testers, but I don't buy it. Also, if you're a dev, do you really like testing enough to give it just as much attention as you do feature implementation? Again, I don't buy it.
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