Toyota blames factory shutdown in Japan on ‘insufficient disk space’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Toyota blames factory shutdown in Japan on ‘insufficient disk space’

#221

Post by salawat » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 4:00 AM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #200

mrguyorama wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meeting to bring in the relevant stakeholders and discuss that reasoning literally costs more than just fucking buying some cloud space.

Had a boss that would swoop into “suspicious” meetings. “There’s 10 people here whose time I bill out at $250/hr each, spending an hour discussing whether to buy a $1,000 software license? Why?”

"Because you don't give us access to the financials, so we have no frigging idea if we can afford it, Frank."

"Some of us don't like jumping into things without looking."

I wager your boss would not be amused with me.

Re: Toyota blames factory shutdown in Japan on ‘insufficient disk space’

#222

Post by alanbernstein » Sat, Sep 09, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #183

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not an entirely unreasonable idea. If a system runs out of disk space, an unexpectedly large number of operations will fail. Which can make recovery more problematic than you would assume. If you can immediately recover some disk space and have breathing room, it could make the difference in restoring service.

Or, you know, have alert on disk space like adults.

This is an alert that must be fixed immediately, with an escape hatch to fix it quickly in case you truly don’t have time to manage your actual files.

It is also trivial to set up, and does not require me to figure out how to set up an OS alert, or trust that whatever alert process is running. So it is an essentially fail proof alert that works the same on any OS.

What’s a good argument against it?

Re: Toyota blames factory shutdown in Japan on ‘insufficient disk space’

#223

Post by thisisit » Sun, Sep 10, 2023, 6:41 AM UTC

My company is going through a cost cutting phase. And somehow cutting disk space ended being one of the priority items.

One of my servers utilized 50% of the allocated space and the "low disk space" alert was set to go off at 80%.

Management came up with an idea - why not reduce it to used space + 20% of used space. That way we save a lot of space.

I had to explain them simple math - if the space is 100GB and I utilize 50GB then the proposal was to have 60GB on the server. But 50/60 is already beyond the 80% alert. And if the target was lower at say 70% alert then we needed at least 22GB i.e. used space + 44% of used space to make it work. It was mind boggling that people can't understand simple ratios.

The most maddening part was that no one could explain the savings if the space was reduced. People making noise said we could "avoid costs" while forgetting that used space is already cost, you cannot "avoid" it.