software failures

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I understand that machines fail for numerous physical reasons, however, I’ve never understood how computer or programs that were working fine all along can suddenly crash or break down if there’s no moving parts and the code hasn’t been otherwise recently patched or updated. This has bugged me for over 25 years and it finally occurred to me that I should it.

In: Technology

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

> I’ve never understood how computer or programs that were working fine all along can suddenly crash or break down if there’s no moving parts

That’s the thing, though. There *are* moving parts.

Sometimes the moving parts are physical, ~~like an old processor losing performance over time,~~ (edit: apparently this isn’t real under normal usage and maintenance) or thermal paste drying up and conducting heat less efficiency, or cat hair clogging up your PCs air intake filter ~~because you never clean it what is wrong with you~~. These can cause your hardware to be less powerful, which can affect your software.

But sometimes the moving parts aren’t physical. A piece of software might work fine with a certain amount of resources, but changes to other programs might either increase the amount of resources used when the program is run (think anti-virus or anti-cheat software for games), or might change the amount of resources available to the program without interacting with the program itself (think another program running in the background that hogs all the RAM), or might reduce the number of resources or types of things the program is allowed to request (think changes to the operating system).

All these can cause a program to slow down or even crash despite the program itself not changing.

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