17:56 Tuesday, October 10 2008

multitasking is hard!

Two more stories of how windows sucks. We've got this Vista test system that we're using for automated testing. Its not exactly the beefiest hardware in the world, but its not _that_ bad either. When this system is running some HOSTEMU based tests (which run only on the CPU, not the GPU), the system seemingly looses its ability to make & process DNS requests. Yes, its network layer dies.
Also, we've been having non-stop fun with the M-Sexchange server. We've got some obscene number of mail servers, due to the fact that they're slow as hell. So performance has been atrocious for quite some time. You'd think, how hard is it to do IMAP such that I don't have to wait several seconds to delete 1 message, but apparently very hard for Microsoft. Finally last week, I got moved to a 'beta' server which was supposed to have much better performance. This box is some 8-way Xeon 16GB beast. Up until this morning, the perf was much better. Today was a nightmare, with the server timing out altogether on numerous occasions. After some discussion with the sysadmin, I learned that the system only has *32* IMAP accounts on it. Yes, 32 IMAP accounts in M-Sexchange are enough to bring it to its knees.