Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Amazon's Web Services just got back up after storm, then was back down due to Leap Second

Reddit was just one of several web outfits that were hit by leap second glitches just after midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Saturday, including Gawker Media and Mozilla, and these sorts of problems tend to pop up with every time there’s a leap second adjustment. In January 2009, for instance, the leap second reportedly caused problems with Sun Microsystems’ Solaris operating system and an Oracle software package.
“Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something,” Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds, tells Wired. “It’s really annoying, because it’s a classic case of code that is basically never run, and thus not tested by users under their normal conditions.”

The hrtimer glitch was patched in the Linux kernel this past March by a Linux kernel hacker named John Stultz, but some versions of Linux have not yet been updated to include this fix. Stultz was unavailable for comment on Monday, but in an post to an online mailing list, he discusses the problem that seemed to hit Reddit.

(Source)

No comments:

Post a Comment