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Day Job Win
So today at the office we have been having an issue with a key piece of software for about 2 weeks. We did not change any code on this application but all the servers where converted to Virtual Machines. This should improve performance but for this one system it killed it completely.
So as per normal the last change in a system should be the primary suspect as to why it is now failing. We were all blaming the virtualization move instead of the code. This happened to be wrong, this time.
So here is what I suspect happened. Before this change the system must have seemed slow, the response time was horrible. So code was implemented to make the system seem like it was performing faster. If you can send data to the screen then the end user will think things are moving faster even if it really isn't. Now we moved to faster systems and this code became the problem. Things were now actually moving faster so this code to look like things were faster started to actually fail.
So after exhausting all efforts with the new system setups I started to finally look at the code. A few tests in and the fake performance boost code became obvious to me. I removed it and things started to work as intended.
Moral of the story I guess is that the last change may be at fault, but it may be some very old "fixes" that are causing the latest change to fail. Sometimes when you change to make things they way they should have been all along then the hacks that were put in place to correct things turn in to problems. I guess you always have to consider the entire system when things go wrong no matter what the last change was.
I know this one was a ramble but I am just happy that I found the issue and resolved it. The business is happy and back to work.