SHARK TANK

Memory problem

"A software developer came into my office complaining that his server ran out of memory every week," pilot fish recalls. "After some careful diagnostics, we identified the problem - his application had a memory leak. Every time his application was run, it ate a little more memory until eventually the memory was all allocated and only a reboot would free it.

"The developer's solution to this problem? a new server with more memory. When I explained that this would only put off the inevitable, he went over my head and somehow convinced our CIO that he needed a bigger server.

"Three weeks later, when the new server shut down from a lack of memory, the developer demanded that I provide him with a cluster of servers so we could reboot one of them periodically while his application continued to leak memory.

"This time, I beat him to the CIO and he had to actually fix his application."

Please don't say "Please wait"

Pilot fish's group does desktop support for a company with remote sites connected via a WAN.

"People in one of our larger offices were complaining that a particular application was slow," says fish.

It turns out that users are griping about conditional drop-down menus — the ones where what the user chooses on a particular drop-down will determine what they get on the next one.

This app has conditional menus that are four or five layers deep, and every time a user selects an item, a box saying Please wait pops up while the next drop-down menu is being populated.

And it's driving users nuts.

Fish's team reports the situation to the app's developers.

"A few minor updates to the application later, the Please wait pop-up had disappeared — as well as the complaints," fish reports.

"The menu system was still the same. Just removing the notice that some processing was happening in the background eliminated the complaints!"

Sysadmin's parting shot

A server is failing, and pilot fish determines that the problem is a failing motherboard. It's still under a support contract, so fish calls the vendor.

"Please tell me the express support code on the front," vendor rep says.

Fish reads off the number.

"That server is in our warehouse," tech says.

No, fish says, I can assure you that it's in my rack. Let's check again.

The rep double-checks. "Our records show a refund was issued for this server 15 months ago," he says. "You used that refund to purchase a more powerful server, and were supposed to ship the original one back."

Fish realises that fifteen months ago was when the previous sysadmin left the company.

Sighs fish, "He never bothered to process the return of the server."