Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 16:58:34 -0800 (PST) From: Doug Barton <Doug@gorean.org> To: Brad Knowles <blk@skynet.be> Cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>, David Murphy <drjolt@redbrick.dcu.ie>, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Voxware is toast. Get used to it. (Re: Suggestions for improving newpcm performance?) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003211628210.71332-100000@dt051n0b.san.rr.com> In-Reply-To: <v04220827b4fd6dbb70af@[195.238.1.121]>
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On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 8:53 AM -0800 2000/3/21, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
>
> > Actually, it's my understanding that Yahoo already has 4.0 in
> > production.
For those that aren't aware, I am a Yahoo! employee, and here in
San Diego we've been using 4.0 for 8 months. We were on the bleeding edge
of the NFS fixes, and I was able to help out (in a small way) by testing
source in a real world, heavy NFS environment. Of course, all of the
credit for the fixes goes to Matt (et al), I just tested stuff. :)
In Santa Clara (Yahoo!'s corporate HQ) most of the stuff is still
3.x, but I'm told that some of the production stuff is moving to 4.0 now.
> However, that doesn't mean that I believe that 4.0 is ready for
> general use in a production environment.
>
> IMO, the guys at Yahoo! know enough about systems like this (and
> probably helped write goodly portions of them) that they can take OS
> versions that are not quite ready for general use in a production
> environment, and they can make them ready.
Well, thank you. :) I would say that for the most part I agree
with Jordan in the sense that once you have it installed, 4.0 is just as
stable as 3.x, in about 80% of the cases. It's the edge cases that need
work, like unusual hardware configurations, etc. If you install it and it
works, there is no need to fear it blowing up on you unexpectedly.
That said, you should treat this like any other software upgrade
from any other vendor. Put it on a test machine first, and gradually
increase the load till you're up to capacity. That's just responsible
system administration. We can only test the system on configurations we
have.
You've mentioned Sun several times. Back in my company's
pre-Yahoo! days we beat the snot out of our sun web servers, doing things
that were mentioned in the documentation, but no one had ever done exactly
the way we were doing them. At the risk of sounding immodest, many of the
special, custom-rolled solaris 2.5 patches that sun developed specifically
for us ended up in the gold version of solaris 2.6. Same situation
exactly, and no different because it was a "commercial" product.
What's my point? Simply that this is the most -release worthy .0
version I've seen in 3 major version upgrades, and I'm proud to be
associated with it. The bugs that are left (and of course, there are
some) are the kinds of things that can only be found through more
extensive use, which will only come if we encourage people, rather than
discourage them. :)
Doug
PS, Although I wish it weren't necessary, just in case someone gets a wild
hair... "My opinions are mine, and mine alone. Nothing I say now, have
said in the past, or will say in the future represents the official
position of Yahoo!, Inc. in any way shape or form." Yadda yadda.
--
"While the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it seems,
it would be easier sometimes to change the past"
- Jackson Browne, "Fountain of Sorrow"
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