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Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

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Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#61

Post by sn_master »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #54
ryanschneider wrote: post #42

I worked on a service that had this exact issue; actually it was worse because it was a signed integer so rolled over in half the time. Even more insidious, we never hit the issue until months into production because we had a pretty consistent two week release process. So the issue only came to light when development slowed down as the project became more stable. Luckily deployments were staggered across datacenters…

I worked at a company with a similar issue. The server is used to get patched and rebooted every month. Then the company decided to lay off huge chunks of operations staff. The software held up remarkably well, but we eventually discovered that software that was never designed to stay up for more than a month will leak memory like crazy if you leave it up for a long enough.

IIS used (still does?) to randomly kill its own processes at random because chances are, if its been running "long enough" its leaking memory anyway.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#62

Post by zaphod12 »

clarry wrote: post #34
wycy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (last year it survived a move without rebooting) How? UPS?

Yep, moved the computer while together with its UPS.

that's very cool, but what the heck is on this server that made it worthwhile to move it like that?!

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#63

Post by me_me_me »

usr1106 wrote: post #37
ggambetta wrote: post #11

This is a pretty uninformative article. It doesn't actually say why Windows would crash, as the title promises. It does some trivial math, points out there's an overflow, and then says "Clearly some code in Windows didn’t handle this too well, and Windows hung."

I don't agree. Nobody of the readers would care about the programming error made 25 years ago in some closed source code. However, timers wrapping around is a very current problem every programmer should be aware of. Not too long ago we had a problem with corrupted video files. After weeks of investigation it turned out that some code used an 32 bit unsigned to count microseconds. Well, that wraps around after approx…

Then tile is misleading.

This is a running theme on HN:

Why X does Y?

Well we don't know but let me talk abut Z in relation to X.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#64

Post by me_me_me »

lmilcin wrote: post #53

This is a myth that cannot be proven or disproven. Nobody was ever able to keep Windows 95/98 up for that long. Jokes aside, around 2001 I was asked to do some maintenance on a machine running Windows 3.11 that was running an app to control all access within the building. When I asked about potential upgrade the guys balked at me saying the machine has couple of years of uptime and they are not very keen to have to r…

That's the reason we still have COBOL and similar systems working.

For exact this reason. They are working and doing what they meant to be doing.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#65

Post by derefr »

usr1106 wrote: post #57
yummybear wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a reader and care, so at least one.

Fair enough. If you stick to open source, then you can always know how programmers got it wrong in the past and present.

No, that allows you to know how programmers of FOSS got it wrong.

Not all programming is the same; there are many lessons to learn about software engineering (mostly in the "what not to do" sense) which, for practical reasons, have only ever showed up in (time- and budget-constrained) closed-source codebases.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#66

Post by derefr »

baybal2 wrote: post #44
tsomctl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm proud that I haven't rebooted in 72 days. The last clause was me acknowledging that this isn't good computer hygiene. edit: And I'm trying to help other people. I know how infuriating it is to have your computer restart in the middle of something, and the above fix is pretty straightforward.

I think having to disable the autoupdate in win10 is the most requested thing for IT helpdesks these days. As a result of this complete ignorance to ergonomics, the windows ecosystem is returning back to WinXP years, and windows users are now getting pwned by years old exploits again. I think microsoft best achievement in win7 was that it was working "out of the box" without having to hack it. Now, win10 again requir…

> Now, win10 again requires to be hacked right out of the box just to work.

Or, to rephrase that (from Microsoft's—and most IT departments'—perspective): Windows now works, as once again users with broken workflows are now forced into fiddly sub-optimal patterns for using the OS, which are more work to maintain than just correcting their workflow. (And IT departments are empowered to not even allow these fiddly sub-optimal patterns through GPOs, allowing them to force users to immediately rectify their workflows.)

Microsoft is trying to be the teacher that slaps your hand with a ruler when you look down at the keyboard instead of touch-typing. Except, instead of touch-typing, they're trying to force people to use (and build) software in a way that makes restarting their computer irrelevant, by e.g. making long-running jobs checkpoint their work and resume from the last checkpoint after a restart.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#67

Post by Stierlitz »

ggambetta wrote: post #11

This is a pretty uninformative article. It doesn't actually say why Windows would crash, as the title promises. It does some trivial math, points out there's an overflow, and then says "Clearly some code in Windows didn’t handle this too well, and Windows hung."

Not just windows 95 and 98 and it would have to be something buried in the OS for a 32 bit counter going to zero to freeze the system.

"Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up"

https://www.techworld.com/news/tech-innovation/microsoft-ser...

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#68

Post by icedchai »

chrisbennet wrote: post #60
icedchai wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a generic, rack mount Intel server running Debian 3.x.

I seen now that my comment was out of context. Sorry. I was referring to longevity in general. Back in the day, DEC computers would just about never go down. They easily had up times of longer than 5 years.

No prob... That is true. I used to do some work on VAXes and they were very reliable.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#69

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

zaphod12 wrote: post #62
clarry wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, moved the computer while together with its UPS.

that's very cool, but what the heck is on this server that made it worthwhile to move it like that?!

Probably his uptime record!

If it's a short enough move I can see doing that just for the hell of it.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#70

Post by NullPrefix »

zaphod12 wrote: post #62
clarry wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, moved the computer while together with its UPS.

that's very cool, but what the heck is on this server that made it worthwhile to move it like that?!

IRC bouncer with unregistered nick.
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