Live data from Hacker News

Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

raw.github.com

101–109 of 109 posts

Re: Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

#101
post #58
post #57

For a 100k, they could have 1) Bought a ton of Heroku dynos with every single addon enabled. That would have given them any version of Rails they wanted with Ruby 1.8, 1.9 or even 2.0; Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, two different kinds of Memcache and three different kinds of asynchronous processing. 2) Gotten fully managed servers at Rackspace with pro support for pretty much any setup they wanted. How is this eve…

3) hired two $5000/mo sysadmins for a year.

I shared your comment with people who actually hire for technical positions, and we all had a good laugh.

Re: Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

#102
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to cry "rotten wood" here, unless the Rails ecosystem is flush with amazing systems wizards who can work around crippling flaws in the OS to run their software. Agreed; however, if they were having problems with Ubuntu (or indeed Linux in general), why didn't they try something else? That's the quick and easy way to see if it's really the platform or your application that's the problem (quick…

What really blows my mind is that they did a regressive rewrite to Rails 2 rather than learn to use profiling tools. The whole situation just makes my brain stare blankly and wonder what on earth was happening over there.

Yes, because it's not like Thomas (my partner/husband) is a performance expert or anything. And it's not like 3-4 Rails Core team members who tried very hard to help us have ever heard of profiling tools.

My mind just exploded, too, due to your willful inability to read the details.

Re: Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

#103
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's very easy to armchair quarterback. But I also have experience actually doing what I'm talking about - for example, I've contributed patches back to Haml and MongoMapper that have improved their respective speeds by ~25% and ~40% on average respectively. I've profiled and optimized multiple production apps to eliminate these kinds of issues, written tools to aid in memory profiling, tracked down and fixed me…

I never said there were leprechauns, nor unsolvable. What I said was: Some of the absolute best & most knowledgeable people couldn't find them. We did have 3-4 of the Rails Core team members investigating our Rails 3.x problems and none of them could figure out what it was. The problems were so terrible it made it impossible to develop with Rails 3.x any more. Obviously Rails Core members were both A) friends, and B)…

You obviously know more about this situation than I do, so I'm not going to be able to win any rational argument unless you choose to disclose more details.

I get your suggestion of hubris here, but again, I'm speaking from experience. I've done the solo technical founder thing, and that came with a whole host of problems that seemed unsolvable and which I didn't have anyone to appeal to for answers. Those are the problems that taught me most of what I know - most importantly that when you run into something that you don't understand, it's an opportunity to learn about it and solve it, rather than to just give up. In the Rails world, where the entire software stack is open-source down to the kernel it runs on, there is literally nothing to get in the way of understanding what's happening at any point of the application's execution.

I'll reiterate that if you want to do a writeup on why your circumstances were unique, and the problems you faced which were so crippling that they forced a rewrite, I'd love to read it. The suggestion that Rails 3 has landmines so critical in it that it necessitated a full product rewrite in Rails 2 is exceptionally weighty and should not be asserted without a very specific cataloging of what those problems are. That particular assertion - "Rails 3 has problems that cost us $XX,XXX and the Rails Core team doesn't have a clue what they are" - is a big one.

Re: Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

#104

What??? How is this even remotely possible? I call BS. It's either a smoke screen for some other issue, or their app was built back asswards. Either way, this post and the circumstances are indicative that Amy and/or the Charm leadership has no idea what they are doing. And they were not even launched? Beta or something? The comment about opening to the general public implies that they weren't getting that much usage…

It's always nice to hear from people who are informed on the facts of the situation, who analyze things calmly and rationally and consider all the individuals involved. Thank you for participating. BTW — you got all the facts wrong. Just in case that wasn't clear. And nobody was asking for your sympathy.

It's good to see that you guys are going down with grace and ironically, lots of charm, and not flailing around like angry children when people question your motives and competency.

Good to know you couldn't master the most popular Linux distro though! Hope the VCs can read this.

Re: Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

#105
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But it also means a lot of people who are looking at her future projects will pause and think twice.

Think twice, like what? "Gee, there's a woman with integrity who shuts down a service while it still works 99% of the time, and refunds my money, instead of growing it like a nutjob until it has weekly downtime like oh I don't know Desk.com"? I do so hope you're right.

A service with a weekly downtime is still more useful than no service at all.

Re: Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

#106
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said there were leprechauns, nor unsolvable. What I said was: Some of the absolute best & most knowledgeable people couldn't find them. We did have 3-4 of the Rails Core team members investigating our Rails 3.x problems and none of them could figure out what it was. The problems were so terrible it made it impossible to develop with Rails 3.x any more. Obviously Rails Core members were both A) friends, and B)…

You obviously know more about this situation than I do, so I'm not going to be able to win any rational argument unless you choose to disclose more details. I get your suggestion of hubris here, but again, I'm speaking from experience. I've done the solo technical founder thing, and that came with a whole host of problems that seemed unsolvable and which I didn't have anyone to appeal to for answers. Those are the pr…

If you'd like to prove your "experience" -- an exceptionally weighty assertion, given I don't know you from Adam, and you know nothing about my product -- I'd be happy to read that writeup.

Re: Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

#107
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/94166175247908864 Ouch.

Wow. Hmm, how can I put this politely? As a desktop Linux user, I don't feel particularly left out in being ineligible for the hiring pool for a company that wouldn't let me use Linux. Maybe they scared away all the competent Linux admins with their negativity towards Linux?

Baseless speculation is one thing, when the original post actually contains information which contradicts you, it's just a sign of laziness.

Re: Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Hmm, how can I put this politely? As a desktop Linux user, I don't feel particularly left out in being ineligible for the hiring pool for a company that wouldn't let me use Linux. Maybe they scared away all the competent Linux admins with their negativity towards Linux?

Baseless speculation is one thing, when the original post actually contains information which contradicts you, it's just a sign of laziness.

What do you mean baseless? There were two provided links showing your distaste for Linux. One could be a fluke (had a bad day), but two shows a pattern. This, added with the mention of using Ubuntu (and not trying another distro) shows that Linux is not your forte.

I, for one, would not like to work for you. I'm not trying to be offensive; in fact, I respect the decision to cut bait when you realized you were over your head. I just don't think I, as a Linux user, would fit in your organization. Many of the good sysadmins also have this same viewpoint, so the above certainly is well founded.

Re: Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

#109

Does this make sense? They don't mention trying to get support from Engine Yard on hosting their app on Rails without kernel panics, or trying a managed solution such as Heroku, or trying other OSs other than Ubuntu such as CentOS or something from Joyent. Just trying with the best possible syadmin they could hire and "Rails Core members". Anyway, kudos for not submitting their users to a service they're not confiden…

or trying other OSs other than Ubuntu such as CentOS or something from Joyent. Or even just Debian. I ran into issues (years ago) with Ubuntu stability due to closed source drivers on a laptop; sure, I have the skills to debug that sort of thing, but why waste my time? I had been running Debian just fine on desktops and servers for years, and after switching the laptop to it, the lockups stopped. I'm more than willin…

Or Arch Linux. Arch packages are pretty vanilla, so it would be a pretty good way to reduce the attack surface.

Also, with Arch, you get less by default, so you'll end up with a cleaner system. I didn't realize how much stuff I didn't need on a default install of Fedora until I set up an Arch system.

Post reply on HN