Parody. Based on a true story.

It was a lazy, summer Saturday morning, just like any other. From my vantage point, I could see kids riding their bikes and playing street hockey. I sat in the middle of an empty garage with my feet propped up on a table, reading a book on how to lift fingerprints from a CVS repository. Saturdays were good days for the detective business, so I knew it wouldn’t be long before customers came in with their problems.

Less than an hour after opening up, Kip, Sally, and Tom walked in. It was Kip that spoke first. “We want to hire you,” he said. He backed up his statement by dropping twenty-five cents into the jar sitting on the table. I put down my book and assessed my clients.

Kip was a good perl programmer; always keeping his parents happy with his ability to quickly write scripts to handle any problem. Sally was the DBA, who held the record for winning the Oracle performance competition at the county fair. Tom was the new systems administrator, who was known for carrying his pet lizard (Suse) with him everywhere he went. All three of them were good at their job.

“I have a perl script that’s taking way too long,” Kip said while dropping a few pages of source code on the table. “It’s a looping function that impacts the database and the filesystem.”

“What exactly does the script do?” I asked.

“The script grabs a lot of records through a SELECT call; each record contains information on a HTML file on the disk. For every record, I run a loop that stats the file, reads the first few lines from the file, makes an UPDATE call to the database with new information, and rests before moving on to the next record.”

Tom jumped in, “The job is scheduled through cron to run every six hours: 6am, noon, 6pm, and midnight. But when I look at the process table, there’s multiple instances running. The jobs are taking too long and not finishing within six hours.”

Sally added her two cents, “The updates don’t seem to have a serious impact against the Database. The table itself is only sixty thousand rows, and it’s fully indexed.” Sally brought me graphs generated from an Oracle management program.

“And the filesystem is fine, too.” Tom said. “The average number of disk requests remains constant. There’s no iowait or contention.” To make his point, he placed a stack of SAR reports on my desk.

I looked at the data sitting on my desk and thought about it for a second.

“Gentlemen,… and Sally,” I said. “This isn’t a problem with code, and it’s not a problem system performance. You could say that the problem lies with not understanding the very nature of the planet.”

All three of them looked at me, perplexed. “But you didn’t even look at my source code!” Kip exclaimed.

“I don’t need to,” I replied. “You already gave me everything I need to know.” I reached into my baseball mitt and grabbed my iPhone. “In five minutes I can have a DNS administrator over here, and he can give you an important fact that you all missed.”

WHAT DID I KNOW THAT THEY DID NOT? THE SOLUTION WILL APPEAR MONDAY, BUT FEEL FREE TO THROW IN YOUR COMMENTS.

Update: The solution has been posted.