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Dumb website only lets one user in at a time

imherefor.me

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Re: Dumb website only lets one user in at a time

#41
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> they would start to experience problems, like seeing eachothers data and stuff. Wait, what? I'm going to need some explanation or story time about how this happened.

It's not that uncommon in some languages where you have a long running monolith (.NET, Java, etc) instead of an instance of something that spins up per request (Node, PHP, etc). If someone does something silly like setting the session handler to be scoped to the monolith app rather than having a scope of a single request you end up with users seeing one another's data. It's dangerously easy to do in some frameworks.

No, more likely someone's used global or static variables. It's got nothing to do with monoliths vs micro services. You can do the same global/static variable crap in a micro-service.

Plus you didn't even need to multi thread in old school asp.net, IIS would create a new process for every request back in the day.

.Net did have a notorious 'session' object, which was the cause of a lot of problems due to novice/offshore programmers, but not the symptoms described above.

I'm not sure why you've targeted monoliths and .net/java, but the problems described above are usually caused by multi-thread/shared variables, which weren't a common thing to do in asp.net. You'd really have to go out of your way. I've seen some terrible .net code written by novices or poorly trained offshorers, but nothing like that.

I'd be more likely to bet they rolled their own cookie or session management or jwt token manager, and I'd guess it was an early js/nodejs app before that ecosystem stabilized when people were raving about going framework free and then footgunning themselves.

Re: Dumb website only lets one user in at a time

#42
post #40

Not at all the same thing I admit, but the company I work for has a product that limits the number of transactions (per user) to 1. Where "transaction" is roughly equivalent to an HTTP request. So if you run a query that takes 30 seconds, get bored, open up a new tab to do something else in the product, your new tab will hang until the transaction in the previous tab has completed. I hate it. There is a special URL t…

A manager thought that they could reduce scope on implementing proper rate limiting after a postmortem or how does this appear?

Re: Dumb website only lets one user in at a time

#44
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> they would start to experience problems, like seeing eachothers data and stuff. Wait, what? I'm going to need some explanation or story time about how this happened.

The idea was that you would visit participating merchants, spend money there and they would give you codes on stickers that they generated from our site and then the customers would use those codes on the site with purchase amount to get sayacash. One problem we had was that the codes we generated turned out to be invalid because... we didnt know why. We generated the codes, but they werent in the database. Where did…

Wow in the first video the man behind the camera refers to customers as clowns. Acts as if the guy he grabbed is stupid and not capable to enter a code on the web page. So weird.

Re: Dumb website only lets one user in at a time

#45
post #27

I once worked for a Cambridge startup called Sayagle where you would Yagle for SayaCash (don't ask). I started after the website was built by a cheap offshore team. It was built with JSF and we soon found that no one thought about multithreading because they only ever tested it with a single user. Needless to say, when more than 10 users were active on the site, they would start to experience problems, like seeing ea…

> startup called Sayagle where you would Yagle for SayaCash (don't ask).

This makes me feel like it's 20 years ago and Caryn Johnson is going to appear on an and shilling this.

Re: Dumb website only lets one user in at a time

#46
post #40

Not at all the same thing I admit, but the company I work for has a product that limits the number of transactions (per user) to 1. Where "transaction" is roughly equivalent to an HTTP request. So if you run a query that takes 30 seconds, get bored, open up a new tab to do something else in the product, your new tab will hang until the transaction in the previous tab has completed. I hate it. There is a special URL t…

ServiceNow?

Re: Dumb website only lets one user in at a time

#48
post #36

About 15 years ago, I knew an online store that was closed on Sundays.

Pretty sure the B&H website still doesn't take or process orders during Shabbat too.

Henry Posner from B&H directly addressed this in a comment back in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12187917
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