+47 47 0
Published 8 years ago by bogdan with 10 Comments

Join the Discussion

  • Auto Tier
  • All
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
Post Comment
  • [Deleted Profile]

    [This comment was removed]

  • Crator
    +4

    If an extra second can cause chaos I think we have a problem in the way things operate.

  • PrismDragon
    +4

    Fascinating. I'll definitely stay up to see this. Then again, I would have been awake in the first place...

  • idlethreat (edited 8 years ago)
    +3

    Company I used to work for handled electrical billing for 11 states. Most of the time, the setup was pretty rock solid. However, once a year during Spring whenever the clocks jumped ahead one hour, the entire system loses it's fucking mind and all hands have to be around to clean up the mess of hundreds of java processes flip out. The processes were pretty time dependent. A discrepancy of over 2 minutes means you're going to have a bad night.

    We'd always order pizza and wait for 0200 to approach. Some projects were done (or close to it) whenever the magic hour hit. Depending on the time zone, some reads were started late, others were finished by that time, still others had hours to go until completion. We'd try to calmly shut down everything until the clock skipped forward, and then bring things back up in an intelligible way. Some years we would win. Others, not so much.

    Never had problems with skip seconds. While our system was extremely time dependent, it wasn't that time dependent.

  • i208khonsu
    +3

    I believe after 2012 both Linux and Windows servers changed how they account for a leap second from having two 59 seconds to adding a 60th second. I understand this change was done to avoid a lot of the crashes that happened to websites last time; where having two things happen at the same second is impermissible. While at my work there were not problems in 2012, because of this change we're a bit worried about it, so we're just closing all transactions for two minutes around the leap second.

  • Winter
    +2

    Very cool! I have always wanted to see a leap second live!

  • spoderman
    +2

    Hell yeah! Extra second of sleep!

  • sriehl
    +1

    Personally, I like the method that Google and Amazon have taken to add the second. A 'Leap Second Smear', just add the second gradually over the course of 24 hours so there is no jump in time (two 59 seconds in a minute; or a 60 before rolling to 0).

Here are some other snaps you may like...