4 ms·

Honestly, I agree with it not being a good fit for a Q&A site. It's a debugging problem, probably needing a discussion, and might even not be of any use to othe

Honestly, I agree with it not being a good fit for a Q&A site. It's a debugging problem, probably needing a discussion, and might even not be of any use to others being that "high cpu" is kinda vague. Seems better suited for a bug report / issue tracker of the relevant library.

jve 1y ago
A community site for multiplayer debugging... I like it! Some people like to tackle problems and feel rewarded when they crack the nut :)
eterm 1y ago
Your'e right, "High CPU" just means more than zero. It was a symptom of the stream continuing to be written to. I've edited the title now to be better.
wokwokwok 1y ago
How can a question that is: 1) clearly technical 2) reproducible 3) has a clear failure condition Not be a suitable candidate for S/O? Did we step into a dimension where only "How do I print('hello world')?" is a valid question while I wasn't watching, because it has a trivial one-line answer? Hard questions doesn't mean they're bad, it just means many people aren't competent answer them. The same goes for obscure questions; there might just not be many people who care, but the question itself is entirely valid. Does that mean they're not suitable for S/O? I... can't believe anyone seriously believes that hard niche problems are too obscure or too hard for S/O to be bothered to grace themselves with. It's absurd. It just baffles me that a question that might take some effort to figure an answer out to might 'not be suitable' to S/O.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  > 2) reproducible Is it? What hardware and OS version should I use to reproduce the server?
  - Const-me 1y ago
    Almost any hardware, .NET runs on x86, AMD64, ARMv7 and ARM64 processors. Almost any desktop or server OS, .NET runs on reasonably modern versions of Windows, Linux and MacOS. The complete source code of the server is in the question.
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      > .NET runs on x86, AMD64, ARMv7 and ARM64 processors. Almost any desktop or server OS, .NET runs on reasonably modern versions of Windows, Linux and MacOS. I'm not really asking where .NET runs; I'm asking what is the environment to reproduce it in? If it only affects certain ones it's a waste of time to just make people guess. > The complete source code of the server is in the question. Yes, I saw.
      - Const-me 1y ago
        The .NET runtime is cross-platform, the lower level asp-net infrastructure is included in the runtime. The higher level CoreWCF RPC library OP uses is written fully in C#. I would expect it to run in all environments supported by the .NET runtime. Personally, I have reproduced the bug on Windows 10 running on AMD64 processor. BTW, the code in the question only communicates to localhost address i.e. doesn’t need any networking on the computer.
- zahlman 1y ago
  The problem with the question as originally asked is not the difficulty or "obscurity". The problem is complexity and scope. We don't debug code for others. We expect them to find the specific part of the code that is causing a problem and showcase a minimal reproducible example. For performance issues, we expect them to profile code and isolate bottlenecks - and then they can ask a hard, obscure question about the bottleneck. Or a very easy one, as long as it's something that could make sense to ask after putting in the effort. In short: we're looking for a question, not a problem. Stack Overflow "can't be bothered to grace itself with" hard niche problems, or with easy common problems. But it is about answering the question that results from an analysis of a problem. Whether that's understanding the exact semantics of argument passing, or just wanting to know how to concatenate lists. And we're looking for one question at a time. If there are multiple issues in a piece of code, they need to be isolated and asked about separately. If the task clearly breaks down into a series of steps in one obvious way, then you need to figure out which of those steps is actually causing a problem first, and ask about whichever steps separately. (Or better yet, find the existing Q&A.) (Questions seeking to figure out an algorithm are usually okay, but usually better asked on e.g. cs.stackexchange.com. And usually, an algorithm worth asking about isn't just "do X, then do Y, then do Z".) Stack Overflow is full of highly competent people who are yearning for questions that demand their specific expertise - recently, not just in the 2010s. Most questions I've asked since 2020 were deliberate hooks to deal with common beginner-level issues or close FAQs that didn't already have a clear duplicate target. (I've stopped contributing new Q&A, but still occasionally help out with curation tasks like editing.) But I asked https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75677825 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75677825 because I actually wanted an answer, and it's an instructive example here. Answering it required detailed expert-level knowledge of modern CPU architectures and reverse engineering of the Python implementation. Asking it required noticing a performance issue, then putting extensive effort into simplifying the examples as much as possible and diagnosing the exact qualities of the input that degrade performance - as well as ruling out other simple explanations and citing the existing Q&A about those. But demonstrating it requires nothing more than a few invocations of the `timeit` standard library module.
  - xeromal 1y ago
    This mentality is probably why SO is dying a slow death
francisofascii 1y ago
I could see it being useful to others. If there is an internal bug that causes the issue or even a code pitfall that causes this issue.
kristianp 1y ago
Stackoverflow is basically a site to help people with programming problems. That includes debugging a problem. I think it's sad that many types of question are not considered suitable for the site. The question was closed as "Not suitable for this site", whatever that means. Tangentially, one thing I think StackOverflow misses in its policy is in not allowing questions that ask for help to evaluate libraries and products in the developer space. There are many questions on SO where someone has asked what is the best library for X, and the question is closed due to site policy, but I think a discussion of what library is best for a use case is a very useful thing to have on SO. The answer to the question can change over time, and multiple alternative solutions can be presented. This is the kind of thing that Reddit has taken over for many different product recommendations, but reddit answers are just comments, they don't have the UI of SO's for commenting on questions and answers.

jve 1y ago

A community site for multiplayer debugging... I like it! Some people like to tackle problems and feel rewarded when they crack the nut :)

eterm 1y ago

Your'e right, "High CPU" just means more than zero. It was a symptom of the stream continuing to be written to. I've edited the title now to be better.

wokwokwok 1y ago

How can a question that is: 1) clearly technical 2) reproducible 3) has a clear failure condition Not be a suitable candidate for S/O? Did we step into a dimension where only "How do I print('hello world')?" is a valid question while I wasn't watching, because it has a trivial one-line answer? Hard questions doesn't mean they're bad, it just means many people aren't competent answer them. The same goes for obscure questions; there might just not be many people who care, but the question itself is entirely valid. Does that mean they're not suitable for S/O? I... can't believe anyone seriously believes that hard niche problems are too obscure or too hard for S/O to be bothered to grace themselves with. It's absurd. It just baffles me that a question that might take some effort to figure an answer out to might 'not be suitable' to S/O.

robertlagrant 1y ago
> 2) reproducible Is it? What hardware and OS version should I use to reproduce the server?
- Const-me 1y ago
  Almost any hardware, .NET runs on x86, AMD64, ARMv7 and ARM64 processors. Almost any desktop or server OS, .NET runs on reasonably modern versions of Windows, Linux and MacOS. The complete source code of the server is in the question.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    > .NET runs on x86, AMD64, ARMv7 and ARM64 processors. Almost any desktop or server OS, .NET runs on reasonably modern versions of Windows, Linux and MacOS. I'm not really asking where .NET runs; I'm asking what is the environment to reproduce it in? If it only affects certain ones it's a waste of time to just make people guess. > The complete source code of the server is in the question. Yes, I saw.
    - Const-me 1y ago
      The .NET runtime is cross-platform, the lower level asp-net infrastructure is included in the runtime. The higher level CoreWCF RPC library OP uses is written fully in C#. I would expect it to run in all environments supported by the .NET runtime. Personally, I have reproduced the bug on Windows 10 running on AMD64 processor. BTW, the code in the question only communicates to localhost address i.e. doesn’t need any networking on the computer.
zahlman 1y ago
The problem with the question as originally asked is not the difficulty or "obscurity". The problem is complexity and scope. We don't debug code for others. We expect them to find the specific part of the code that is causing a problem and showcase a minimal reproducible example. For performance issues, we expect them to profile code and isolate bottlenecks - and then they can ask a hard, obscure question about the bottleneck. Or a very easy one, as long as it's something that could make sense to ask after putting in the effort. In short: we're looking for a question, not a problem. Stack Overflow "can't be bothered to grace itself with" hard niche problems, or with easy common problems. But it is about answering the question that results from an analysis of a problem. Whether that's understanding the exact semantics of argument passing, or just wanting to know how to concatenate lists. And we're looking for one question at a time. If there are multiple issues in a piece of code, they need to be isolated and asked about separately. If the task clearly breaks down into a series of steps in one obvious way, then you need to figure out which of those steps is actually causing a problem first, and ask about whichever steps separately. (Or better yet, find the existing Q&A.) (Questions seeking to figure out an algorithm are usually okay, but usually better asked on e.g. cs.stackexchange.com. And usually, an algorithm worth asking about isn't just "do X, then do Y, then do Z".) Stack Overflow is full of highly competent people who are yearning for questions that demand their specific expertise - recently, not just in the 2010s. Most questions I've asked since 2020 were deliberate hooks to deal with common beginner-level issues or close FAQs that didn't already have a clear duplicate target. (I've stopped contributing new Q&A, but still occasionally help out with curation tasks like editing.) But I asked https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75677825 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75677825 because I actually wanted an answer, and it's an instructive example here. Answering it required detailed expert-level knowledge of modern CPU architectures and reverse engineering of the Python implementation. Asking it required noticing a performance issue, then putting extensive effort into simplifying the examples as much as possible and diagnosing the exact qualities of the input that degrade performance - as well as ruling out other simple explanations and citing the existing Q&A about those. But demonstrating it requires nothing more than a few invocations of the `timeit` standard library module.
- xeromal 1y ago
  This mentality is probably why SO is dying a slow death

francisofascii 1y ago

I could see it being useful to others. If there is an internal bug that causes the issue or even a code pitfall that causes this issue.

kristianp 1y ago

Stackoverflow is basically a site to help people with programming problems. That includes debugging a problem. I think it's sad that many types of question are not considered suitable for the site. The question was closed as "Not suitable for this site", whatever that means. Tangentially, one thing I think StackOverflow misses in its policy is in not allowing questions that ask for help to evaluate libraries and products in the developer space. There are many questions on SO where someone has asked what is the best library for X, and the question is closed due to site policy, but I think a discussion of what library is best for a use case is a very useful thing to have on SO. The answer to the question can change over time, and multiple alternative solutions can be presented. This is the kind of thing that Reddit has taken over for many different product recommendations, but reddit answers are just comments, they don't have the UI of SO's for commenting on questions and answers.