PSA: My first program ran for 47 hours before I realized I made a loop that never ends

I was so proud of my simple Python script that was supposed to count to 100! I hit run and went to make dinner. I checked back an hour later and it was still going. I left my laptop on overnight and all through the next day. After 47 hours, I finally looked at my code and saw I wrote 'while x > 0:' instead of 'while x < 100:'. My variable started at 1, so it was just stuck forever! I felt so silly but also kind of amazed my computer didn't crash. Has anyone else made a simple mistake that locked up their computer for a really long time?

3 comments

3 Comments

parker_palmer4419d ago

My buddy Ben left a script running on a shared server in college. It ate up all the processing power for three days straight. The sysadmin had to hunt him down to kill it.

grays1319d ago

Come on now, that sysadmin should've seen it coming! Shared college servers are a free-for-all, it's part of the learning curve. Ben's script was basically a stress test, showing them where their system was weak. If anything, he did them a favor by finding the limits before something truly important crashed. They should've had better safeguards to stop any one user from hogging everything.

viola_allen18d ago

But calling it a stress test feels like a stretch. It was a shared server, not a testing lab. Real work from other students probably ground to a halt for those three days. That's not finding a weak spot, it's just being a bad neighbor. The sysadmin's job is to keep things running for everyone, not chase down runaway scripts.