Murphy’s law
Published January 14, 2008 by Wim 500 views
When something is not supposed to go wrong, it goes wrong. That’s Murphy’s law, and that is exactly what is happing at our project.
Last week we were suffering from a very slow development environment. Checking out projects in Siebel Tools took 30 - 35 minutes instead of the normal 1 - 2 minutes. Even after moving the database to a new machine where we used only 3 of the 32 processors and we had 21GB ram left, it remained extremely slow.
After some investigation, it turned out that is was a configuration issue. It seemed that every query comming from a programm with SIEB in its name, was checked to see if it was allowed to run. This was causing the slowliness. After changin that check, all went fine.
Untill I received a phonecall this evening. It was my colleague saying that I didn’t need to bother comming in at 6 o’clock as I normally do, because the entire development database was down and the DBA’s come in at 7h30. So let’s hope it’s not a severe issue and we can continue bugfixing very soo.
This article is about: checking out • database • development
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wow, you misunderstood murphy’s law. Or is that supposed to be a joke?
>> Nick K:
Could you please explain me the law then?
Hi Wim,
Well you said:
When something is not supposed to go wrong, it goes wrong. That’s Murphy’s law.
Nothing is ever supposed to go wrong so the statement is pretty shaky anyway (If something should ‘go wrong’ and it goes wrong, then actually it went right hehe).
Murphys law is that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. So if there is a tiny little chance that it will go wrong for whatever reason, then, that’s going to happen (or has happened).
Or from Wikipedia:
Murphy’s law is an adage in Western culture that broadly states, “if anything can go wrong, it will.”
By the way: I have a question about Siebel, I haven’t worked with it much but i’m trying to add lots of users in an automated action, say about 10,000 users with various responsibilities. Is that possible?
I need it for a stress test of a external tool.
-Nick