my job: a vignette

Last week, one of our server applications, which has had a long list of troubles, suddenly developed a massive memory leak, seizing up and crashing over time. We set it to restart every 30 minutes, which is hardly sustainable, because it reduces our capacity and reliability.

I volunteered to go sit with the engineering team while they decided what to do. The options were:

1. spend some time with the debugger and profiler and such and try to figure it out, or
2. start upgrading the code to Ruby 1.9 and hope that fixes it.

My sage advice:

"That's not exactly an afternoon's work, right?"

"Right."

"And it will probably introduce additional bugs?"

"Yep."

"That sounds like very expensive voodoo, that might not even work."

"So you think we should do the profiling thing?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, we'll do that."

From any angle, it's difficult to believe I actually do this for a living.