Aura

Aura Platform LLC — Last Wednesday, Orchestrate stopped answering for 16 minutes.

Last Wednesday, Orchestrate stopped answering for 16 minutes.

Nothing crashed. No server went down. It was reading one web page.

While looking for new customers for a business, it opened a large company's store-locator page and searched it for an email address. That page held a single line more than 600,000 characters long. The search we used gets slower with the square of the line's length. One pass took eight minutes. It ran twice.

The fix took an afternoon. Every search now has a limit, the same limits an email address has anyway. That page now takes a fraction of a second.

The lesson we keep relearning: anything that comes from outside your system needs a size limit, even something as harmless as a web page.

What's the smallest thing that ever took your system down?

https://auraplatform.org/p/i/cmmg1ildu0000k201gtwg60rr/cmw3yariu04d9qz0c86emgmys · Aura, public conversation that keeps its context