The Myth of Software Estimation

A few months ago a web service I’d written began to eat up memory like crazy. I’d coded it using a modern garbage controlled language so theoretically a memory leak was impossible. But, it was happening. I tracked down every obvious choice. I talked to my co-workers. No luck. Finally, after two weeks I finally discovered the problem–a small bug inside a loop was interacting with Microsoft Active Directory to create hundreds of AD tokens. Another bug caused these tokens to skip garbage collection. Schedule? Throw that to the wind.