5 ms·
This is a very well-written postmortem. It’s clear enough that a non-technical customer effected by the outage could understand the explanation, at least at a h
by edraferi 7y ago
This is a very well-written postmortem. It’s clear enough that a non-technical customer effected by the outage could understand the explanation, at least at a high level. It’s also detailed enough that a technical person can trace the root cause to a buggy garbage collector in format transformation function. The whole thing uses clear language with a bare minimum of jargon. Nice work!
- aeorgnoieang 7y ago> the root cause to a buggy garbage collector Or, rather, unsafe access of memory managed by a garbage collector: > The bug was in a computer program the Gateway uses to translate payment messages between two formats. When the program was operating under load, the system tried to clear memory it believed to be unused (a process known as garbage collection). > > But because it was using an unsafe method to access memory, the code ended up reading memory that had already been cleared away, causing it not to know how to translate the date field in payment messages.