Conversation

Since the UNIX time just passed 1700000000, it's time to tell you about my favorite bug! Back in 2001, I'd just implemented a database backed job queue at work. It was all going great, and then suddenly on September 10, 2001 (I know I know...), we noticed it was hung! No jobs were getting taken. It took ages to figure it out: The UNIX clock had just rolled over to 1000000000. The jobs were sorted by timestamp, but the timestamps were stored as strings. Since the most recent completed job started with a 9 as the first character in the job ID, it was being sorted after the new jobs, and since the "most recent" job was already completed, the system just assumed no work needed to be done. That was a fun one to figure out!