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I have a similar "fixit" tale from my days on a large project. Our UNIX root filesystems were becoming overly busy around noon to the point that it impacted the 30,000 users. The "busy" behavior lasted almost 90 minutes. The cause? A bad "awk" script run as root from cron that started at noon each day. It was an awful piece of code. I looked it over and replaced it with 30 lines of C. The compiled C version did the same work in 50 milliseconds that the "awk" script did in 90 minutes. Problem solved X 80 UNIX hosts.

Another opportunity occurred when Bellcore sent a 53,000 record file. Each line was name=value colon separated, newline terminated. This story dates to July 1983. The COBOL team was tasked with removing 3 name/value element when found in any line record. Running on a UNIVAC 1100/64, the COBOL code completed the task in 16 hours. I was offered an opportunity to perform the same processing, but written in C. I would do it in 10 lines of Python today, but that hadn't been invented. My solution was 400 lines of C. The file was processed in 20 minutes executing on the same host as the COBOL that took 16 hours. One difference is that my C ran in a guest UNIX subsystem. The COBOL ran natively on the 1100/64.

The C compiler I was using came from Bellcore. A very early K&R variety. As soon as I could muster time, I started building GCC on that host and wrote what we would term ANSI C today. It was still an ugly environment with 36 bit "words".

When I worked for one client way back when, they had a server that would go down for about 5 minutes every night, for no apparent reason, the thing would reboot. They could tell from the logs that it rebooted every morning...

Finally someone actually stayed and physically watched the server...

Cleaning lady was coming in every night, unplugging the machine, plugging in her vaccuum, vaccuuming the floor, and then plugging it back in.

Needless to say, they decided to invest in a dedicated server room after that was discovered. hahahah