[vox] [fwd] [svlug] mission critical computing and air safety

[Michael Wenk]

On Wednesday 22 September 2004 11:36, Tim Riley wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 10:30, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> > Here's a nice long post with some more details about the air traffic
> > issue last week (and his thoughts on the Windows conversions) from Rick
> > Kwan over at SVLUG.  Just thought it was interesting reading...
>
> Sure is an interesting read. It seems like a memory leak in
> the application caused the problem. However, are memory leaks
> so common that they should be expected? Should the operating
> system return leaked memory to the memory pool? Should a person
> have to reboot a computer every month to reset leaked memory?
>
> It seems like the last question is the only one that matters: Yes,
> since MS is forcing archaic memory management onto the commercial
> world.
>
> <snip>
>
> _______________________________________________
> vox mailing list
> vox at lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox

Well, I think we're all missing the real point.  There is no way that one 
single system should be able to take down an entire ARTCC.  No matter what 
the system is, Unix, Windows, or a RTOS(which is what they should be running)  
there is always a possibility of failure.  While the nature of the problem 
may have precluded an automatic failover(unlikely), the system operator 
should have initiated a manual failover.  It seems to me that the root cause 
of this problem is system architecture design, not an implementation issue.  

Mike

-- 
wenk at praxis.homedns.org
Mike Wenk