There Can Be Only One!
By Randal L. Schwartz
I find it nice that with my familiarity with Perl, I can solve little emergencies without having to flip through a bunch of manuals. For example, I had a problem the other day that caused my server to exhibit horrible response time, yet within a few minutes and a couple dozen lines of Perl code, I got things back in order.
My server is on a nicely configured Linux box colocated at an ISP with 24/7 reboot service (although the box is rarely rebooted, as you'll see). It's actually shared with a dozen other e-commerce sites, and this is by design. When the box is down, it's not just me yelling at the admin, but a dozen others are calling as well. Thus, we all have to play nicely together, because we're sharing the CPU and the resources.
One of the ISP's customers is the regional sales office of a Very Large Company (VLC) that has one of the largest market capitalizations in the world right now. (Why they don't run these applications on their corporate site, I'm not sure, but I never asked.) VLC apparently has some sort of free email newsletter that has subscribers counted in the mid-five-digits or so. A recent newsletter (one that went out over the weekend) effectively said, "We are terminating all mail subscriptions before the next issue unless you visit URL such-and-so and enter your renewal information." In other words, if the subscribers didn't respond, they'd be dropped from the list.
Well, you can imagine the panic that this generated on a Monday morning as thousands of people returned to work to discover that they might have been removed from the mailing list.
