In slumber enveloped, the serenity of rest time
broke with the
beam of that covetous beacon.
Splitting the silence, the wail of the
siren
rouses the morlock with moaning and mumbling.
Darkness
gives way to the dull yellow desk lamp,
and cursing the bite of her
feckless companions
she ponders the glass in her palm. With its
klaxon
now muzzled it blinks “Major Outage: Sev 3-B”.
She provisions from the ice box her potion of power
whose silver
blue can offers syrupy salvation
from leadening eyelids. The
loveseat will serve as
her desk and her dorm for the dark morning
hours.
The hum of her laptop joins humbly in harmony
the
heat-wicking windowbox insistently whirring.
She queues up some
Green Day and groans a fresh oath
to quit software for good and seek
quiet tranquility.
She enters the password then promptly peruses
the litany of
errors now littering her screen.
“Performance degraded for: fraud
data pipelines”,
but subtle signs point to the services
upstream.
That cantankerous old man the devs call “Core
Platform”
complains night and day about nothing important,
but
swiftly she spots it, an eyecatching stacktrace
Connection Timed Out - db_conn.rb
She thinks on that byte hoard that deftly must balance
the
dutiful golems that grasp at her treasures
with suitors unnamed who
arrive unnanounced
and whose comfort is paramount while collecting
their purchases.
With the press of a button she now beholds
Postgres,
its resources labeled and cheerfully rendered.
The
plateau she dreaded sits perched on a warning:
“DB max connections
(this can’t be exceeded)”.
She flicks to the terminal and sets fingers flying
as with a wry
chuckle she scours the changelog.
“The finance team, surely, those
fools never learn.”
git blame conf/db.yaml two
years since the count changed?
She rifles through
git tag for recent releases.
The lone update last night
fix: log deprecations.
A dutiful note dropped in
/var/log/debug.log,
which can’t be the culprit, she
sits back confounded.
With nothing to go on she rest chin on knuckles.
That muse of the
hopeless she now consults, metrics.
Her sleek charts she cuts
through with slicing and dicing
til curious discrepancy catches her
notice.
The limit is ten threads yet one node reports twelve?
core-api-03, the db confirms it.
Her draught of
alacrity she drains in one motion,
then pulls up her xterm and grins
with fresh purpose
Through tunnels electric she leaps in an instant
and lazily
gropes with ls -Alh .
With nothing amiss there she
picks through the node’s logs.
A restart on schedule and rote
logging since then.
But ps aux shows old pid and new
pid,
and with a quick pkill she puts down the
zombie.
At first, nothing changes. She fears she’s mistaken.
The
graph wavers briefly… then drops towards the green zone.
She fires off the all clear and gives a swift fist bump,
then
spies through the window the fingers of sunrise.
The sleep she
missed out on creeps slowly but surely
til shoulders feel heavy and
hands show a tremor.
She groans at the clock but cannot resist
grinning
while clicking the button to close out the ticket.
Her
duty is done, so she’ll sleep through the daybreak
and bask in the
glow of another bug squashed.