It doesn’t take more than a few experiences with a computing machine that balks at simple tasks to really just want to trade it in. In a work day, there is only so much time one can spend coaxing basic performance out of a machine. There are the typical underlying reasons for under-performance, the huge amounts of content that may be clogging a machine…some malware possibly…or the behavior of the software…or user error (usually in some form).

Part of this is my fault. I use multiple machines, and I’ve kept an older computer that should have been retired. I am leery of making the time to map new drives and to make sure that the software is all functioning. The disruption to the work is also somewhat prohibitive. And the difficulty of getting any sort of new machine—even hand-me-downs—is prohibitive as well.

Then again, it is critical to have machines that can actually do the work. There is a cost in time in trying to constantly scrape off excess files and to push a machine to do the work…

Running Multiple Processes

This quandary occurred again recently, and I am currently banished off of my main machine while I am trying to update a load of contents to a remote server on a live project. At this moment, I have high hopes that the updates will go smoothly and that there’s nothing to worry about.

So what happened? It looks like the software saves a zipped copy of the entire project every time we update the contents on the remote server. Given our “use case” of swapping out video for text over time, this has meant multiple updates. Even when we’ve had small textual changes, we’ve updated, and that has meant more and more zipped files clogging the main file…Every time we saved the file, it ate into space on a variety of devices… And then when we hit one revision too many, the whole computer system got clogged.

I would not have imagined that this would be the problem because it makes no sense for a new zipped file to be made each time a revision goes up. Rather, maybe only just the prior version should be saved…as a backup—but not versions 5 or 6 back—each one remembered on a local drive. This sort of software behavior seems to come out of an over-abundance of caution. Plus, on the remote server, they do at least keep a prior version. Maybe there should be some sort of warning in bright letters somewhere to let us know that this is how the software behaves. (This may be an outcome of a recent patch –which is why I never noticed the excess files before.)

Updating the User

This user has a much better sense of where to look now if something acts wonky. Also, this user will not exult in an easy remote server update because I was exulting just the day before all the metaphorical gears got stripped and nothing worked. I am just a little better now at troubleshooting because I have another space to look. Initially, I was in the file just to delete a zipped file in the hopes of freeing up space and ungumming-up-the-works if that might be an issue. What I found was something that was surprising and eye-opening. If I have a chance to chat with the software maker again in the near future (I probably will), I hope to mention this and get them to output another patch. I can’t imagine that my own “use case” is this far out of the norm to be an exceptional challenge.