I just remembered a proprietry ERP system I worked with that accepted EDI orders placed in a certain directory on their Solaris server. Every 30 seconds it woul

I just remembered a proprietry ERP system I worked with that accepted EDI orders placed in a certain directory on their Solaris server. Every 30 seconds it would empty that folder and begin to process the orders. The company must have implemented a design internally to spawn a new process to deal with each new order. The first I noticed was that the log file it spat out was not in order, it had messages about different parts of different orders all intermingled... then 1 day I put 700 orders in and it launched 700 processes and the server ran out of swap space and crashed.... Their support team felt I was unreasonable! I had to rate limit afterwards with my system drip feeding the orders! It is funny to think that it is still in use I understand, and busier than ever!