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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

How does rebooting a workstation set them back a million dollars?

Well one place I worked, the entire network's DNS was hanging off the back of a single VAXstation running NetBSD. That was serving for 2350 machines. One day, someone accidentally fork bombed it via a bad script and when they power cycled it the disk popped. It took an entire day of 1500 people twiddling thumbs before they got it back...

They must have a turd that size somewhere ;-)

I think he meant rebooting everyone's workstation - at 35K employees even a couple minutes per person is something you probably want to avoid wasting.

I don't like this way of thinking. The two or even ten minutes you spend not using your PC are not lost. It could be a unique occasion to talk to your colleagues, it could be time well spent cleaning some papers. If you think by the minute if work, then you better start eating pills instead off lunch, use headphones during commute and check emails while watching sunset with gf. We ain't no robots, sir.

My work (not Google) get compelled reboots sometimes for patches. We're able to delay them suitably long enough, so most of the time you just go ahead and shut down at the end of the day. Either that, or you hit reboot at lunch. Everything worthwhile is running in a VNC anyway, so you just reconnect to your VNC after your laptop boots back up.

Uptime on the VNCs lasts as long as physically possible (e.g., a full IT shutdown, or hardware failure on the machine)

"The two or even ten minutes you spend not using your PC are not lost. It could be a unique occasion to talk to your colleagues, it could be time well spent cleaning some papers."

I think that is true if you control when the reboot happens. If it just happens then it might be at exactly the wrong time.

If you control when the reboot happens, you will plan something for it. What I think is absolutely necessary in our lives, even for those at Google, is a significant amount of unplanned events, unexpected experiences, or any other occasion to prove to yourself, to feel deeply inside, that you are not a robot.

Maybe it is personal, maybe it is cultural, or maybe it isn't: I don't like (an understatement) fully planned trips where you are told "the 8th of July at 10:45, you will get an artistic ecstasy in fron of the Taj-Mahal, the 9th [...]". I won't work on anything that has no risk to be hard to control and nothing unexpected can happen. I don't mind if my PC has to be off for 10 minutes.

("Disclaimer": I live in China, not in Switzerland.)

I work as a teacher. I can plan lessons as much as I like (and today I'm planning for an observed lesson next week or week after) but I can tell you, something unexpected always happens in the actual lesson. The plan lasts 20 minutes if that. The rest is 'reflection in action' to quote Schon.

Not sure, that is an interesting number. If they had 20,000 devs, with an average boot time of 10 min, at $5 a min (which seems high, if it's just salary), then it would cost them $1m. But given that developers don't work 24/7, and I also think that Google has less than 20k devs (the company is only 30k). But it could have to do with math outside of salary, such as power or maintenance costs. I think it was Google that did a study on how screen saver choice affected their power bill, so I wouldn't be surprised if they knew exactly how much a reboot cost.

You also have to consider the break in flow. A boot time of a minute, at the wrong time, can cost the mental context of the interrupted developers to get dumped on the floor. That costs a lot more than a minute to recover from.

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