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Sober IT truths from the island-state

by Michael Tan, Singapore

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Google shows us the way to explain outages

Sep 2, 2009 14:59

Check this out: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-todays-gmail-issue.html

Google explains in detail how Gmail died for about a hundred minutes. Patiently. My favorite excerpts:

"We had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers--servers which direct Web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response."

"A few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system 'stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!'. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded."

Point is, Google explained itself. It treated us as adults. Makes Google seem more transparent.

Whether this is PR talking or the engineers insisting they have their 2 cents on the Google blog, or a corporate culture of transparency,狢 don't know. What I do know is that this behavior is desirable. It did the right thing.

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About Michael Tan

Michael Tan is lucky enough not to have to choose between his job and his passion. He is the responsible for all aspects of developing new businesses and sourcing new productlines for a regional IT distribution company. He also oversees the company's legal affairs as General Counsel. In real life, he is a technology enthusiast, from both the fun and business viewpoint. The only choices he has to make are whether to play with his astro telescopes, his PC games, his Wii console, hit the track, tweak his car, or refine his biofilters, post his blogs, research for a new digicam, scour every forum to feed his habit further, play with his son… You can reach Michael at michaeltanyk@gmail.com ALL BLOGPOSTS ONLY REFLECT MICHAEL'S OPINIONS AND NOBODY ELSES'.