September 24, 2001. I remember the day like it was yesterday, or at least as clear as the hazy remnants of what we now call “the dot-com bubble.” The tech world was a mix of excitement over new technologies—Napster was still big news, VMware was just starting to make waves in virtualization, and Sun Microsystems was still riding high on their Java wave. But lurking beneath all that was the Y2K fallout.

I was working at a small startup in those days, mostly dealing with Linux and Apache servers. Our main product was a simple web portal for businesses, but it relied heavily on these technologies to keep customer data flowing smoothly. We were pretty confident about our implementation, but the specter of Y2K was still fresh in everyone’s minds.

One evening, as I settled into my desk after a long day, I got an email from one of our tech support guys. “Hey Brandon,” it said, “we’ve just noticed some strange behavior with Apache and Sendmail on our primary server. Everything seemed fine during the business hours, but now we’re getting tons of errors when trying to access certain pages.”

I quickly checked in with my colleague who was on duty that night. “Okay,” he explained, “basically, every time someone tries to log into their account after 9 PM, they get a 500 error. Apache seems to be choking on the request somehow.”

This wasn’t the first time we had faced strange issues in our logs, but it felt different this time. There was something about the timing that just didn’t sit right with me. I decided to take a deeper dive into the server’s behavior.

After some quick diagnostics, I realized that Apache was indeed having trouble processing requests after 9 PM. But why? Was it memory-related? A bug in our custom scripts? Or could it be something more sinister?

I started digging through the logs and noticed a pattern: every error seemed to correspond with the end of business hours. That’s when people usually shut down their workstations, which means fewer processes running in the background.

To test this theory, I decided to run some stress tests on our Apache server during off-hours. I used a tool called ab (Apache Bench) and sent it 100 requests per second for half an hour. The results were clear: after about two hours of non-work hours, the server would start chugging.

What was going on? It turned out that we had misconfigured Sendmail to run some cron jobs during off-hours. These scripts were hogging memory and causing Apache to crash when it got too busy. Once I fixed those configurations and optimized the server’s resource management, things started running smoothly again.

Looking back, this incident highlighted a few key lessons for me:

1. Attention to Detail: Even simple misconfigurations can cause big problems.
2. Test Everything: Just because something works during business hours doesn’t mean it will work at 3 AM.
3. Document Your Assumptions: Understanding how your system behaves outside normal operating conditions is crucial.

In the tech world of 2001, we were still getting our feet wet with technologies like Linux and Apache. The dot-com bust was starting to hit hard, but open-source tools like these kept us going. It was a time when Y2K was more than just an acronym—it was something you could feel in the air.

This incident solidified my belief that robust testing and meticulous configuration management are non-negotiables for any engineer. The Linux desktop wasn’t mainstream yet, but it was gaining traction, and I couldn’t wait to see what else would happen in this rapidly evolving landscape.

For now, though, it was time to go home. I had a few more tweaks to make before the server would be fully optimized. And who knew? Maybe next month there would be another challenge waiting for me.

Stay tuned for the next update on my blog when we dive into the early days of VMware and how it changed the game in virtualization. Until then, keep your servers healthy and your logs clean!