Comment 9Y0H Re: A bit embarrassing... software developer for years....

Story

June Will Be 1 Second Longer

Preview

A bit embarrassing... software developer for years.... (Score: 1)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2015-05-28 09:06 (#9XP1)

...but I simply don't understand the problem.
It's possible that programs not equipped to handle the extra second could have an issue.
What programs? If the clock is not correct I might have a minor problem with builds. I might recompile more than necessary. So What? But crashes? Especially so boring systems like websites? Possibly "lightly" corrupt databases, yes. Perhaps the order of a few posts mixed up, yes. This should be all. I'd probably have think hard how to crash a program on purpose just because the time is one second off.

Re: A bit embarrassing... software developer for years.... (Score: 2, Interesting)

by seriously@pipedot.org on 2015-05-28 10:12 (#9XSV)

I remember reading that technical post on Google blog about problems they had with leap seconds and how they fixed them.

http://googleblog.blogspot.be/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping-seconds.html

The section "Why time matters at Google" might especially be of interest ;)

Re: A bit embarrassing... software developer for years.... (Score: 1)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2015-05-28 10:21 (#9XTX)

Exactly what I expected: Minor problems with consistency: "Does email that comes in during that second get stored correctly?". Ok, for a service like Google this might not be a minor problem. But this is light years away from a system crash.

Re: A bit embarrassing... software developer for years.... (Score: 1)

by seriously@pipedot.org on 2015-05-28 11:57 (#9Y0H)

Mmmh, I agree, in Google's case it seems more about synchronisation of their multiple machines across their multiple datacenters (and locking issues that go with it). But a bit of googling showed some other more crash-like reports:

http://blog.fastmail.com/2012/07/03/a-story-of-leaping-seconds/
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1203.1/04598.html
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=6b43ae8a619d17c4935c3320d2ef9e92bdeed05d
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/154713

In this case, the "2012 crash", it was kernel-related (something about a multi-CPU race inside the kernel that caused lock issues if I get this right), so not really a problem that you could do anything to avoid in userland.

Now if you're using *BSD, of course, you're most certainly safe ;)

Junk Status

Not marked as junk