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Old 10-12-2020, 10:13 AM   #10
Undertoad
Radical Centrist
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Cottage of Prussia
Posts: 31,423
"The world is coming to an end - save your buffers" was a cookie for a long time. It's a joke from computer history, when if your computer crashed it meant the loss of the data in cache memory, ie. the buffers, which could be traumatic if it happened at the wrong time.

Operating system history: The idea of "orderly shutdown" was built into Linux, but not so much into Windows. the idea was that Windows could die at any moment and not become confused, because it was shitty and crashed all the time and so a crash had to not be as traumatic as it was. Linux needed buffers because it was performing things for everybody, not just for one user. So it didn't crash so much, and if you were turning it off, it would carefully write all the data in memory to disk before shutting down.

Since Windows wasn't caching things for everybody, it meant that Windows was slow at doing server-type stuff -- at the moment when the Internet was coming online, and suddenly server type stuff became wildly important. (Of course, in Windows you would lose documents and spreadsheets in a crash, because the ability to save was left up to the applications, and autosave was cutting-edge technology and they've only just recently figured out that it is a good idea.)

Cellar is performing an orderly shutdown.
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