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…the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it's like 15 friends or something, right?
- Mark Zuckerberg, presumably to one of his three friends
Since even the President of the United States is using ChatGPT to cheat on his homework and make bonkers social media posts these days, we need to have a talk about AI.
Loading times for web pages is one of the key metrics we like to tune. Users will put up with a lot if they feel like they application is responsive. So when Caivs was handed 20MB of PHP and told, "one of the key pages takes like 30-45 seconds to load. Figure out why," it was at least a clear goal.
Combing through that gigantic pile of code to try and understand what was happening was an uphill battle. Eventually, Caivs just decided to check the traffic logs while running the application. That highlighted a huge spike in traffic every time the page loaded, and that helped Caivs narrow down exactly where the problem was.
Alice picked up a ticket about a broken date calculation in a React application, and dropped into the code to take a look. There, she found this:
Apr 25export function calcYears(date) {
return date && Math.floor((new Date() - new Date(date).getTime()) / 3.15576e10)
}
The lights are on here and the roof is intact and I'm grateful. Is anybody home? You decide.
Pharm fan Ian S. clucked "Perhaps they'll put those as dates on my headstone." If you're very lucky.
For testing networking systems, load simulators are useful: send a bunch of realistic looking traffic and see what happens as you increase the amount of sent traffic. These sorts of simulators often rely on being heavily multithreaded, since one computer can, if pushed, generate a lot of network traffic.
Thus, when Jonas inherited a heavily multithreaded system for simulating load, that wasn't a surprise. The surprise was that the developer responsible for it didn't really understand threading in Java. Probably in other languages too, but in this case, Java was what they were using.