I visited an old website I had been involved with yesterday. The project ran for some 3 years and it presented some very interesting challenges. It got me wondering about the quantity of code I’ve written over the last 10 years. It surely must amount to hundreds of thousands of lines of ASP, VB, C#, TSQL, Javascript and various other languages.
How much code would you need to write to ensure that there was a CPU somewhere on the planet running some of your code every second of every day? The thought of that is enough to make a developer break out in a bit of a cold sweat. I’m only grateful I’m not behind the navigation systems on the Boeing 747 or similar! Although, my understanding of such software is that they run the same software produced by multiple vendors in parallel to ensure they get the correct results! Reassuring indeed.
As most of my development has been web based, it’s probably possible to work out how many page impressions I’d need. Assuming every request costs 0.5 of a second of CPU time in processing, it’s fairly easy to calculate how many page views you’d need.
According to Google, there are 31, 556, 926 seconds in a year (you can use their great conversion system for things like this). We’d need to double this based on the amazing performance of my code!
Therefore, I’d need somewhere in the region of 63,113,852 page views a year to ensure I always had some code running every second of every day!
My conclusion from this result is that I’m probably not quite there yet. Perhaps I could attempt to rewrite the Windows TCP/IP stack – that should do it!