Published on 12, July, 2020
I use google docs on my phone to explain to people when I'm in a meltdown or shutdown, in those google docs there are various levels of formality and technical language so I can adjust the explanation to the audience.
However, there are two which I have yet to find the right person for so I'm sharing them here instead.
Shutdown: Error 404: this person is not responding.
This is where the computer can't find the right link and the resource doesn't exist, this is often how a shutdown is for me, the link to access the functioning bits of the brain just doesn't work
Meltdown: Error 503: this service is not available
This is often where a website has too many demands on it, eg too many people trying to use the website, and thus just stops working. Felt it mirrored a meltdown well
Feel free to comment with other tech comparisons
I was told by a uni lecturer many years ago that when the ffirst versions of Unix were being tested they had a problem whereby under very high load (aka stress) the swapping algorithm which ran as a process (swap) would sometimes decide that it was the best task to swap out, resulting in an immediate crash of the whole OS. Another problem was that it could get so busy that swap would spend all available CPU time trying to swap processes and not allowing the CPU to do any productive work, grinding the whole OS to a halt. That was called “thrashing”. I think those mechanisms adequately describe how my brain does meltdown and shutdown, respectively.
Thrashing is actually a brilliant analogy