Kann sich noch jemand an den Twitter Fail-Whale erinnern? Vor ein paar Tagen ist eine Geschichte auf Hacker News aufgetaucht, die sein Erscheinen in ein neues Licht stellt.
I worked at Twitter as a contractor in 2008 […] during the Fail Whale era. The site would go down pretty much daily, and every time the ops team brought it back up, Twitter’s VCs would send over a few bottles of really fancy imported Belgian beer (the kind with elaborate wire bottle caps that tell you it’s expensive). […] Also at that time, I remember asking the head DB guy about a specific metric, and he ran a live query against the database in front of me. It took a while to return, so he used the time to explain how, in an ordinary setup, the query would have locked all the tables and brought down the entire site, but he was using special SQL-fu to make it run transparently.
We got so engrossed in the details of this topic that half an hour passed before we noticed that everyone had stopped working and was running around in a frenzy. Someone finally ran over and asked him if he was doing a query, he hit Control-C, and Twitter came back up.
Ich mag solche Episoden aus den Frühzeiten diverser Services. Good times! (Wer sich allerdings nicht an den Fail-Whale erinnern kann, dem empfehle ich The Story of Twitter’s Fail Whale im Atlantic. Dort wird der Artikel in der hervorragenden und mich jedes Mal entzückenden Rubrik „Abandoned Internet Icons“ geführt.)