Wayback Wednesday: Slow down there, buddy
As a sysadmin at this manufacturing plant, this pilot fish is aware of the problems that persistently plague a database that sits on a server that another admin is responsible for.
“About once a quarter, users would start complaining about how slow the database was,” says fish. “The database sysadmin would be questioned extensively by management and given hell for the problems on his systems.
“He would run diagnostics and pull his hair out for a few days. Then eventually things would go back to normal.”
This goes on for years, until the other sysadmin moves on — and fish becomes responsible for the database server.
Fortunately, his ex-colleague did manage to convince management to buy a comprehensive performance monitoring suite, though that never led him to pinpoint the slowdown.