Thinking hard

>BTW: While you seem to think a lot these days ;-) if you have any
>other serious design flaws to mention, it is really the right time to
>speak up. 

Ok, you asked for it. :-)

I think terminating the server only by getting /Admin/Exit is a 
bad idea. The server must be able to deal with a normal kill 
command, flush anything in memory to disk and terminate 
properly. What if things (the system) get locked up and you 
cannot terminate the server in the way it is intended today? 
What if errors in the server prohibit normal termination? We had 
situations like these! Eventually it is the normal procedure for 
a system administrator to just type the "reboot" command to 
reboot the machine, without too much thinking required. This 
afternoon we had to re-install Jigsaw because it simply refused 
to start up after a crash.

The design flaw is that Jigsaw's cache is not write-through. If 
everything in the cache always had its counterpart on the disk 
things were fine and you could terminate/crash Jigsaw any 
moment. Jigsaw should be robust like this to become a production 
server.

  Dipl.-Inform. Rainer Klute        NADS - Advertising on nets
  NADS GmbH
  Emil-Figge-Str. 80                Tel.: +49 231 9751230
D-44227 Dortmund                    Fax:  +49 231 9751238

            <http://www.nads.de/~klute/>

Received on Friday, 9 August 1996 10:00:14 UTC