3 ms·
My guess: when you search, google fires up several background processes/threads for that query. Not only search, but also for a quick answers, maps, ads. Thes
by jbverschoor 4y ago
My guess: when you search, google fires up several background processes/threads for that query.
Not only search, but also for a quick answers, maps, ads. These services might be slower than the search query or a max response time, in which case they get ignored.
When the search query finished, they might wait a few milliseconds for the other services, if it’s still under the target response time. After that google will render the results with all info that completed.
My guess is that one of these services crashes, most likely the main search one. This way you can wait forever for it to finish.
So it’s probably a bug in the way it’s yielding/waiting for the spawned processes.
Other option is that for certain processes they don’t spawn a background process, because it’s faster to run locally/direct/in-memory, because the data is quite small and just rums on every node.
they’d start this after spawning the other processes, so if this service returns an error, it might screw up the yielding/waiting/collecting, although I’d expect an exception/error page instead of the indefinite waiting that’s happening
- jbverschoor 4y agoNot sure why I got downvoted but whatever
- tarsinge 4y agoBecause you are just stating what is obviously happening on a very high-level ("it crashes because something crash"), it’s generic and is applicable to any website. Your comment is empty regarding why it happens only to that query specifically.
- jbverschoor 4y agoIt's not that obvious. Most (99.99+%) applications don't spawn queries in parallel to run in parallel. The site didn't crash but was hanging. And I specifically described how this could happen -> an error the code that waits for futures to finish The whole thread is pretty obvious, right? Some website not working. big deal.
- tomalpha 4y agoI didn’t downvote you, but if folks are coming here looking for answers then a simple “my guess” based (apparently at least) on pure speculation and without inside knowledge of how Google’s setup _actually_ works, doesn’t add much to the conversation. If your post had included something like “I used to work on Google search”, “I used to work on Bing search”, or “I’ve spotted this piece of data in the network responses being sent to my browser and therefore” you might have gotten a more favourable reception.
- jdthedisciple 4y agoDoesn't match my experience here on HN. As far as I can tell educated outsider guesses are generally welcome and - to me personally - sometimes even enlightening.