The number five is a small number if you are comparing the number of breaths you take during an hour, or quite a lot if you are measuring how many heartbeats you have in a second – everything is relative.
In the world of computers you might find five to be quite a big number if that is how many times you have to reboot your personal computer a day. Yet when speaking about some of the large Unix computers in the computer center even the number three is much too large. These computers can be run months or years without a reboot, and a lot of them do.
That is why we were particularly troubled by the payment application that we were supporting. It was pretty unstable, so unstable in fact that we decided to automatically restart it every eight hours. It was started in the morning before daily processing in Europe, Asia and America. We knew this pretty bad, but management wouldn’t commit to rewriting this interface if we couldn’t guarantee that the new one would run better – it might and it might not. The system stability was tied software vendors API and their product and we couldn’t make any promises about that.
Actually three wouldn’t have been so bad if we could have held it to that, but when the system became confused it would have to be manually restarted during the working day. This may be anywhere between zero and five times during an eight hour shift – well the most manual restarts ever required during a single day was about eight.
To be honest, I don’t think that the vendor’s product was 100% at fault. A great deal of it was how that customer extension was written along with a somewhat unstable product. It would not be even terribly noteworthy if my company wasn’t a fortune 1000 company.