Google Chromium Bug: Huge amount of goats teleported | Hacker News Reader

Google Chromium Bug: Huge amount of goats teleported

code.google.com

65 pointsjanitha15 comments

The comments are priceless.

  I am concerned about the risk of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease being transmitted between
  teleported goats. At the speed they are being teleported, one can hardly expect the
  biofilters to be able to keep up with filtering out prions. What precautions have been
  taken to avoid cross-contamination of goat matter streams?

What are ewe guys bleating about?

either bug or egg, but it realy teleports goats too fast.

Is there a hidden pop culture reference here (goats teleporting), or is the humor random?

I think it's in reference to the goats that Google rented to graze their front lawns.

They don't do bounds checking, so the number of goats teleported can overflow. I noticed when I was at -2,089,949,091 goats teleported.

That's what happens when you cross the goat transport streams. Goats just start disappearing.

This comment by mdm@chromium.org makes me think there's a puzzle to be solved here:

The teleportation rate is actually a linear function of the number of tabs you have open. Each tab has to teleport a certain number of goats to operate, although as dank points out we were able to optimize it during the Linux port and reduce the number of goats required. I have some further optimizations in mind if we'd like to reduce it more to address the issue mentioned in comment #11.

Without looking at the code, what could that column really be measuring?

Since it says "each tab has to teleport a certain number of goats to operate," I speculate that it has something to do with monitoring the performance of the tabs, or maybe just the tabs reporting their memory/cpu/traffic back to the master process.

If mdm truly knows what the code does, and if a browser _has_ to do it, maybe if a browser doesn't send it's statistics back, or poll the main process, then it is declared unresponsive.

My guess was that it was some kind of count of the number of messages passed between the different chrome processes - but it probably grows way too fast for that to be the case.

I found this post: http://www.sorcerers-isle.net/article/goats_teleported.html which does take a look at the source code. Although that doesn't reveal the intention behind the counter, my guess is that it was perhaps done to test the updating of the task manager.

// See design doc at http://go/at-teleporter for more information.

I believe //go/... is an internal Google URL. The plot thickens!

If I were a cynical <insert_competitor> fanboy, I would speculate that they just make up humorous bugs so they can pretend to provide customer service.

Chromium is the open source project, not the browser.

Developers should know better than to use a GET request for teleportation.

Aww it doesn't work in Chromium 3 :(

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