Whats happening to our server?

My brother John is a geek. He finished his Computer Science Masters earlier in the year, on artificial intelligence and it's application to internet worms (or some such thing). Now he works in Jobug spending half his life writing perl scripts and the other half driving to and from his job. He blogs about his semigration** to Joburg here.

The other day he sent me a transcript of an internet conversation he had with a friend. South African current affairs in geek speak...

(11:40:06) Alex: maybe if we had competent governement... oh wait, thats a pipe dream
(11:40:22) John: Dude, a lot of the current government is competent.
(11:40:26) John: Some parts aren't great.
(11:40:38) John: But quite a lot of it is, at least, substantially improved.
(11:40:49) Alex: well.. i guessd their not entirely incompitent.. but i think they should be the best
(11:41:05) John: Think about this for a second:
(11:41:10) John: If you were running a server.
(11:41:17) John: And it permanently ran at 10% load.
(11:41:30) John: And that's all you'd ever had, so you'd never been able to test it.
(11:41:40) John: And suddenly it hits 98% load.
(11:41:43) John: What is the server going to do?
(11:41:51) John: What's gonna happen?
(11:41:56) Alex: very likely fall over
(11:42:00) John: No.
(11:42:07) John: The term you're looking for is "undefined behaviour"
(11:42:11) John: It might handle it.
(11:42:12) Alex: ah
(11:42:14) John: It might fall over.
(11:42:15) John: Now.
(11:42:39) John: Our government, 15 years ago, catered for 10% of the populace. Then, in the course of about two years, began to cater for more like 98%.
(11:42:51) John: You wonder why home affairs queues are so long?
(11:43:00) Alex: yeh true


** John tells me that semigrating is moving withing your own country, but to an area that is so different that it feels like you have moved to a new country. Semigrating, like emigrating, only semi-emigrating... The jump from East London to Joburg is apparently big enough to feel like you have moved to a whole new country - semigrating!