[wp-forums] For people having 3.1 Drama Llamas

[Mika A Epstein]

A not-directed-at-one-person rant ensues.

tl;dr - 10% failure is not really that high and is about HALF average for distributed software.

Okay, ranty stuff starts!

My huge pet peeve is when people get all het up about the failure rates of WordPress or ANY software, frankly. Did you know 19% failure rate is actually pretty average for software? 

Check the SquareTrade study on cellphones for an example. The iPhone has an 11% failure rate. The BlackBerry has 14% and the Treo is the worst at 21%
http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_iPhone_Study_1108.pdf

So ... 10%?  That's fucking golden in day-one. The worst problems we will have will be from the most RARELY executed code (the weird stuff breaks more often because it's used less, basically, thank you H. Hecht).

I don't say this to trivialize the problems people have. They ARE problems!  WE as a whole should fix them. But they're unavoidable.  The point isn't to remove all problems, but to mitigate them and make them have LESS of a problem. Fix THIS problem, then move on to the next.

To your point of 10% failure rate of the automatic install, and needing manual goosing, make a list of themes and plugins on that 10% and see if something THERE is the same across the board. What about PHP?  Caching?  SQL?  FTP?  Server load at the time of the install?  I can make the auto-install fail 100% of the time if I do it when my server load is above a certain point. That's not WordPress, that's my server. Etc etc.

And it's Mika with an A, not Mike :)

On 23 Feb 2011, at 8:08:07PM, Christopher Ross wrote:

> Mike, just to add to this one ...
> 
> I run 100 or so blogs, each runs individual WP setups (no multisite) and so today I did ~100 upgrades on ~25 hosts. I do this for each release with about a 2% failure rate. The 3.1 upgrade today had closer to a 10% failure rate, with no obvious reason. I don't consider this extreme, certainly not unmanageable but there is a slightly higher failure rate for 3.1 for some reason (could just be server volume of latest.zip for all I know).
> 
> In most cases, a fresh install of the core files fixed the issue. In a couple of extreme cases, I needed to log into the admin for the upgrade to work before anything would appear in the front end.
> 
> Chris
> 
> On 2011-02-23, at 9:10 PM, Mika A Epstein wrote:
> 
>> FATAL ERRORS
>> Fatal error in the output means either your theme doesn't like 3.1, you have a plugin that doesn't like 3.1, or you have an incomplete upgrade.
> 
> 
> __
> 
> Christopher Ross
> 
> http://christopherross.ca
> http://www.thisismyurl.com
> 
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----
Mika A Epstein (aka Ipstenu)
http://ipstenu.org