Synchronized Reboot Smokes Skype
Skype has finished its sleuthing and is ready to report on the conditions which led to the company discovering a flaw in its P2P networking code. The culprit? It turns out that Skype’s code wasn’t prepared for a massive restart of PCs caused by the standard Windows patching process.
“The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they rebooted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update,” Skype indicated on its blog. In other words, the conditions which led to the outage began with August’s very own Patch Tuesday. The name is given to the second Tuesday of the month, which Microsoft typically uses to push out patches via Windows Update.
Most “Patch Tuesdays” contain significant code updates and often require a restart to take effect. With so many machines restarting, Skype says the network was sunk into a vicious cycle of deprivation, wherein rebooting machines would attempt to log on to the Skype network, but so many machines were rebooting that the network was unable to meet demand.
While already there are several reports this morning trying to put the blame on Microsoft’s Windows Update, Skype makes clear the issue: “Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly.”
Tags:code_updates, Internet, Microsoft, networking_code, p2p_networking, skype, Software, vicious_cycle, Windows, windows update
August 21st, 2007 at 10:06 pm
[IMG Comments][IMG ]