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A single line of code cost $8000

pietrasiak.com

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Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#211

Post by Tade0 »

mieko wrote: post #114

For people finding this thread via web search in the future: screen.studio is macOS screen recording software that checks for updates every five minutes. Somehow, that alone is NOT the bug described in this post. The /other/ bug described in this blog is: their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes. The software developers there consider all of this normal except the actual download, which c…

Several months ago I was dealing with huge audio interruption issues - typical sign of some other, blocking, high-priority process taking too long.

Turns out Adobe's update service on Windows reads(and I guess also writes) about 130MB of data from disk every few seconds. My disk was 90%+ full, so the usual slowdown related to this was occurring, slowing disk I/O to around 80MB/s.

Disabled the service and the issues disappeared. I bought a new laptop since, but the whole thing struck me as such an unnecessary thing to do.

I mean, why was that service reading/writing so much?

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#212

Post by treyd »

aziaziazi wrote: post #210
vrosas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I built an app that “phones home” regularly, I added the ability for the backend to respond to the client with an override backoff that the client would respect over the default.

Could you expend on what is an "override backoff" ?

Presumably the back end could tell the client not to check again for some amount of time. Sounds similar but different to cache TTLs, as those are passive.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#213

Post by skull723 »

999900000999 wrote: post #173
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big clouds love these people too. So much of the software industry is just an outrageous combination of inexperience and "YOLO". Every problem can be solved by just giving AWS another $100,000 this month because we don't have time (and don't know how) to make even basically optimized software. So just burn the gas and electricity and give more money to the YAML merchants at Amazon.

That was the promise of "The Cloud". Data centers are big and scary, no body wanted to run their own. The hypothetical cost savings of firing half the IT department was too good to pass up. AWS even offered some credits to get started, first hit's free. Next thing you know your AWS spend is out if control. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. Instead of writing better software, which might slow down develop…

Not really. I run several web applications on one 15$ VPS. Although the user count is <5. But I think it would need quite a lot of users for the resource usage to go up to a critical level.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#214

Post by partdavid »

mobilemidget wrote: post #167
benwilber0 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes

Or.. Why on earth you need to check for updates 288x per day. It sounds and seems more like 'usage monitoring' rather than being sure that all users have the most recent bug fixes installed. What's wrong with checking for updates upon start once (and cache per day). What critical bugs or fixes could have been issued that warrant 288 update checks.

It sounds right, and this is the kind of thing I'd expect if developers are baking configuration into their app distribution. Like, you'd want usage rules or tracking plugins to be timely, and they didn't figure out how to check and distribute configurations in that way without a new app build.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#215

Post by ses1984 »

aziaziazi wrote: post #210
vrosas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I built an app that “phones home” regularly, I added the ability for the backend to respond to the client with an override backoff that the client would respect over the default.

Could you expend on what is an "override backoff" ?

The client might have a feature to retry certain failures, and it’s using a particular rate, probably not retrying n times one right after the other in rapid succession. This is called backoff.

The server can return an override backoff so the server can tell the client how often or how quickly to retry.

It’s nice to have in case some bug causes increased load somewhere, you can flip a value on the server and relieve pressure from the system.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#216

Post by Olshansky »

Reminds me of some Twitter lore from 2012. I was just an intern....

This is back in the Rails days, before they switch to Scala.

I heard that there was a fail-whale no one could solve related to Twitter's identity service. IIRC, it was called "Gizmoduck."

The engineer who built it had left.

They brought him in for half a day of work to solve the P0.

*Supposedly*, he got paid ~50K for that day of work.

Simultaneously outrageous but also reasonable if you've seen the inside of big tech. The ROI is worth it.

That is all.

Disclaimer: don't know if it's true, but the story is cool.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#217

Post by latexr »

benwilber0 wrote: post #151
mieko wrote: post #114

For people finding this thread via web search in the future: screen.studio is macOS screen recording software that checks for updates every five minutes. Somehow, that alone is NOT the bug described in this post. The /other/ bug described in this blog is: their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes. The software developers there consider all of this normal except the actual download, which c…

> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes

As I recall, it’s an Electron app. I just checked and the current version of Google Chrome is 635 MB, with its DMG being 224 MB.

So yes, it’s insane, but easy to see where the size comes from.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#218

Post by PeeMcGee »

pixl97 wrote: post #172
benwilber0 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes

Because developers can suck. I work with developers in SCA/SBOM and there are countless devs that seem to work by #include 'everything'. You see crap where they include a misspelled package name and then they fix it by including the right package but not removing the wrong one! .

The lack of dependency awareness drives me insane. Someone imports a single method from the wrong package, which snowballs into the blind leading the blind and pinning transitive dependencies in order to deliver quick "fixes" for things we don't even use or need, which ultimately becomes 100 different kinds of nightmare that stifle any hope of agility.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#219

Post by philomath_mn »

While this unfortunate, I am sure I also have single lines in production with greater cost and equivalent value (close to none) -- and I've only worked at small companies. I am sure some of y'all can beat this by ~2 orders of magnitude.

Databricks is happy to have us as a customer.

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