Comment by jdblair
6 years ago
Overflow is not the only kind of bug triggered by uptime. In February 1991 a Patriot missile failed to intercept and incoming Scud due to an accumulation of time-based errors. The missile system had been online for 100 hours and this resulted in enough error that the intercept calculation was incorrect. People died.
http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~arnold//disasters/patriot.htm...
I wonder if there were ever uptime issues caused by heap fragmentation.
This happens on set top boxes, especially when the graphics memory heap is allocated separately from the system memory heap. The graphics memory heap can be fragmented and surfaces stop being rendered because there are no contiguous memory blocks large enough. Having two heaps on a low memory device leads to unfortunate compromises.