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From: m3047@halcyon.com (Fred Morris)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: funny story
Date: 20 Oct 1993 16:33:21 -0700
Organization: Northwest Nexus Inc.
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Keywords: humour stories AST fable

Was going through some old files the other day..

------------------------

The offending program's purpose is to perform centralized transaction 
reconciliation in a transaction processing system.

Transactions come in to the program from a number of sources 
asynchronously, being detected by polling I/O status blocks when the 
process awakes from hibernation.

When a transaction is detected, a GTR (General-purpose Transaction 
Record) is allocated from the heap and the resulting AllGTR (ALLocated 
GTR) is sent to the Swamp, "... a vast morass where AllGTRs go to await 
their final reckoning...".

The total number of GTRs is fixed to prevent monopolization of the entire 
system in case of a sudden influx of transactions.

To perform certain critical operations in clearing a transaction and 
sending the GTR back to heap, somebody decided to perform these critical 
operations by queueing the relevant routines as ASTs with the $DCLAST 
system service, since no AST will be interrupted for the delivery of another.

Later it was determined that certain transactions needed service in a 
"more timely manner" (sic), and so ASTs were declared on the I/O channels 
whcih receive these particular transactions.  These ASTs are intended to 
perform a certain amoujnt of preprocessing, including allocation of GTRs, 
to expedite the processing of these critical transactions.

As a result, too many of these critical transactions coming in when the 
Swamp was almost full would cause the entire program to hang, since the 
ASTs responsible for clearing out the Swamp wouldn't be delivered until 
the preprocessing ASTs completed.

MORAL OF THE STORY: It's hard to remember that you set out to drain the 
Swamp when you're up to your AST in AllGTRs.

------------------------

this is fiction; I really received it as a secret radio transmission from 
another planet; attach all ground straps and extinguish all flames before 
fueling; are you sure you really want to delete; do not open door when 
air speed exceeds 80 mph; I'm really Chimmy the Chimpanzee.

Fred Morris
m3047@halcyon.com