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Comment by redox99 | Hacker News Reader

Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware.

If they want to reduce support calls, then have more reliable gear.

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> Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that companies should make support calls less necessary by providing better products and services, but "just write bug-free software" is not a solution.

Giving the device enough RAM to survive memory leaks during heavy usage would also be a valid option, as is automatic rebooting to get the device back into a clean state before the user experiences a persistent loss of connectivity. There are a wealth of available workarounds when you control everything about the device's hardware and software and almost everything about the network environments it'll be operating in. Fixing all the tricky, subtle software bugs is not necessary.

For a community full of engineers, I'm always surprised that people always take absolutionist views on minor technical decisions, rather than thinking of the tradeoffs made that got there.

The obvious trade off here is engineering effort vs. development cost, and when the tech support solution is "have you tried turning it off, then on again?" We know which path was chosen

You can't just throw RAM at embedded devices that you make millions of and have extremely thin margins on. Have you bothered to look at the price of RAM today? At high numbers and low margins you can barely afford to throw capacitors at them, let alone precious rare expensive RAM.

We're talking about devices where the retail price is approximately one month of revenue from one customer, and that's if there isn't an extra fee specifically for the equipment rental. Yes, consumer electronics tend to have very thin margins, but residential ISPs are playing a very different game.

No, XFinity are the ones who decided their routers “““need””” to have unwanted RAM-hungry extra functionality beyond just serving their residential customers' needs. Their routers participate in an entire access-sharing system so they can greedily double-dip by reselling access to your own connection that you already pay them for:

- https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/wifi

- https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/xfinity-wifi-hotspo...

A memory leak will consume any amount of ram by definition, adding more ram is not a solution either.

You're implying all software/hardware is of equal quality. I've had many routers with years of uptime, never requiring a reboot.

And I'm sure they had a lot of bugs, but not every bug means hanging to the point of requiring a reboot during normal operation.

Even a proper watchdog would, after some downtime, recover the system.

This isn't a case where you need bug free software. This is a case where the frequency of fatal bugs is directly proportional to the support cost. Fix the common bugs, then write off the support for rare ones as a cost of doing business.

The effect of cheap robo support is not reducing the cost of support. It is reducing the cost of development by enabling a more buggy product while maintaining the previous support costs.

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