5 ms·

Could this has been a deliberate/malicious act? Why else would someone post 20,000 consecutive characters of whitespace on a comment line? Also, the "homepage"

Could this has been a deliberate/malicious act? Why else would someone post 20,000 consecutive characters of whitespace on a comment line? Also, the "homepage" of StackOverflow does not show any 'comments' - it is just the top questions? Why was the page loading any comments in the first place?

mrbgty 10y ago
more likely select all copy + paste
allannienhuis 10y ago
on a site like stackoverflow, I would think they get malicious requests like that all the time. Even if it wasn't malicious (perhaps an otherwise benign script gone amuk), I bet something like this happens very often. It would be interesting to find out if something like this goes into their automated regression tests. :)
KyleBrandt 10y ago
We don't think it was intentional. Maybe copy and paste, or something an editor did. To clarify the "comment" was not a Stack Overflow comment, but rather a comment in a code block inside a question.
- amenod 10y ago
  I am genuinly curious: how did you fix it? Did you remove the spaces first and then tried to use substring / trimming with proper testing done, or did you just implement it in place? I have faced similar dilemmas in the past, but I usually go with "put out the fire, then find the correct solution" approach.
  - KyleBrandt 10y ago
    Implement in place to put the fire out. Pushed to half the web servers, made sure it fixed the problem, then rolled it out the rest. Coding under fire :P
    - skeletonjelly 10y ago
      How did you test this on half? Accessing the single web server directly I'm guessing? Probably not public
- pcunite 10y ago
  May we see this code comment? Sounds interesting.
bluedino 10y ago
Imagine if they had only posted 10,000 or 15,000 characters, and it just slowed the site down. How fast would it have been noticed? Hours? Days?
- mason55 10y ago
  Good monitoring (which I expect the SO guys to have) would have triggered on a spike in 95% or 99% response times so probably almost as quickly
  - gbrayut 10y ago
    Actually we average less than 10% CPU on the web tier... so anything over that warrants investigation. Graph of CPU during today's issue at https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/755793398544601088 https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/755793398544601088

mrbgty 10y ago

more likely select all copy + paste

allannienhuis 10y ago

on a site like stackoverflow, I would think they get malicious requests like that all the time. Even if it wasn't malicious (perhaps an otherwise benign script gone amuk), I bet something like this happens very often. It would be interesting to find out if something like this goes into their automated regression tests. :)

KyleBrandt 10y ago

We don't think it was intentional. Maybe copy and paste, or something an editor did. To clarify the "comment" was not a Stack Overflow comment, but rather a comment in a code block inside a question.

amenod 10y ago
I am genuinly curious: how did you fix it? Did you remove the spaces first and then tried to use substring / trimming with proper testing done, or did you just implement it in place? I have faced similar dilemmas in the past, but I usually go with "put out the fire, then find the correct solution" approach.
- KyleBrandt 10y ago
  Implement in place to put the fire out. Pushed to half the web servers, made sure it fixed the problem, then rolled it out the rest. Coding under fire :P
  - skeletonjelly 10y ago
    How did you test this on half? Accessing the single web server directly I'm guessing? Probably not public
pcunite 10y ago
May we see this code comment? Sounds interesting.

bluedino 10y ago

Imagine if they had only posted 10,000 or 15,000 characters, and it just slowed the site down. How fast would it have been noticed? Hours? Days?

mason55 10y ago
Good monitoring (which I expect the SO guys to have) would have triggered on a spike in 95% or 99% response times so probably almost as quickly
- gbrayut 10y ago
  Actually we average less than 10% CPU on the web tier... so anything over that warrants investigation. Graph of CPU during today's issue at https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/755793398544601088 https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/755793398544601088