Wednesday 1 September 2004 — This is 20 years old. Be careful.
George Candea and Armando Fox have an interesting paper entitled Crash-Only Software. They noticed that it is faster to crash a system and reboot it than it is to shut it down cleanly and reboot it (because of the time saved not doing an orderly shutdown). And since robust systems have to be prepared to recover properly from crashes anyway, why not skip the orderly shutdown and just crash? I haven’t gotten my head around all of the implications, but their logic is both counter-intuitive and compelling at the same time.
Comments
VC7.1 shuts down cleanly and (relatively) quickly.
Btw, Andrew you need a geek rant blog ;-)
Also, if the software is always crashed, then each time you start up you’re going through your disaster code, therefore its gets a much more thorough testing. That disaster code is important, but if it gets run rarely, which is what is supposed to happen with most software, then the disaster code rarely gets tested in production scenarios. That’s a bad thing.
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