Release It!, 2nd Edition

Blocked Threads

Managed runtime languages such as C#, Java, and Ruby almost never really crash. Sure, they get application errors, but it’s relatively rare to see the kind of core dump that a C or C++ program would have. I still remember when a rogue pointer in C could reduce the whole machine to a navel-gazing heap. (Anyone else remember Amiga’s “Guru Meditation” errors?) Here’s the catch about interpreted languages, though. The interpreter can be running, and the application can still be totally deadlocked, doing nothing useful.

As often happens, adding complexity to solve one problem creates the risk of entirely new failure modes. Multithreading makes application servers scalable enough to handle the web’s largest sites, but it also introduces ...