What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 1996

Bernd Felsche

The thing is MS do have some real Engineers, and some very very good ones. The problem is that they don't actually seem to have anything like the required influence on the deliverable product to make it good.

I watched a video linked from Slashdot the other day about the guys who test & debug www.microsoft.com. They dropped some pretty huge plantshells... Eg: they were running 16Gbyte servers to keep up with the memory leakage in their web applications... The web apps themselves were getting "cycled" (ie: end and restarted) every 5-10 minutes minimum because they ran out of address space (due to leakage). IIRC 32bit windows has a 2Gb limit, so those apps are leaking memory at a rate of 2Gb every 5 minutes.

The next plantshell was that every application has a "cache" of it's recent query results ... Net result they have to rebuild 100-1000 result caches *every* 5-10 minutes... The "solution" for that problem was 64bit addressing... It is too easy to scoff from afar but they seem to have a fundamental cultural problem there.

Oh and another plantshell... So-called "Enterprise Ready" Windows was getting 10Mbit-sec sustained down 1Gbit-sec pipes with just 30ms of latency... Excuse me Mr., but that ain't Enterprise Ready software. Their solution for that is to run Alpha versions of Vista on *production* sites...

The thing is : They appeared to genuinely think that this was great and they were making progress. That was one ugly bit of viewing, I was left wondering how many man years could have been saved if they had used a genuinely enterprise ready OS...

Cheers, Rupert