Okay, let me tell you about this thing we nicknamed ‘pulga’. Not exactly a highlight, but it happened.
Getting Started with ‘Pulga’
So, this whole ‘pulga’ situation kicked off on a Monday morning, naturally. Just got my coffee, ready to ease into the week, and then the alerts started firing. Some tiny, forgotten service, buried deep in the system, was acting up. Nobody really knew what it did anymore, just that it was old and probably shouldn’t be touched. We called it ‘pulga’ because it was small, annoying, and hard to get rid of.
First thing I did was try to connect to the damn thing. Took me a while just to find the right credentials. Old docs, wrong IPs, the usual mess. Finally got in. Looked around. The logs were cryptic, basically useless. Standard procedure, right? Just fill up the disk with nonsense.
Digging Deeper
I started poking around. Checked running processes. Nothing looked immediately suspicious, but the CPU was spiking randomly. Memory usage was all over the place. It felt like chasing a ghost. I thought, maybe it’s a resource leak somewhere. So, I tried restarting the main process for ‘pulga’. It calmed down for like, five minutes, then went right back to its erratic behavior. Great.
Next step was looking at the dependencies. This ‘pulga’ thing relied on a couple of other ancient services. Maybe the problem wasn’t even ‘pulga’ itself? Spent a good hour tracing connections, checking the health of those other services. They seemed fine, mostly. A bit slow, maybe, but not failing outright.
This was getting annoying. Felt like I was just guessing. Decided to go old school. Started stripping things down. Turned off bits of its functionality one by one. Found a weird module that was trying to connect to an external endpoint that didn’t exist anymore. Disabled that. Things got a little better, but the core issue persisted.
Finding the Real Problem
Ran deeper diagnostics. Put some monitoring tools on it to get more granular data. Watched the process behavior, the system calls. It was tedious work. Just sitting there, watching graphs, trying to spot a pattern.
After lunch, staring at the screen, I noticed something weird. A specific function call was happening way too often, coinciding with the spikes. Traced that function back through the code. It was buried in some legacy library, poorly written, doing some incredibly inefficient data processing loop. Why was it triggering so often? Looked at the input queue for ‘pulga’. It was getting hammered with malformed requests from another internal tool nobody had updated.
- Identified the problematic service (‘pulga’).
- Checked basic logs and processes.
- Restarted the service (temporary fix).
- Investigated dependencies.
- Disabled defunct parts of the service.
- Used detailed monitoring to find patterns.
- Traced excessive function calls.
- Found the root cause: malformed input from another tool.
The Fix and Aftermath
So, the real issue wasn’t ‘pulga’ itself being totally broken, but it couldn’t handle the garbage input gracefully. Figures. The quick fix was to put a filter upstream, before the bad requests even reached ‘pulga’. Just dropped the malformed stuff. Immediately, ‘pulga’ calmed down. CPU usage dropped, memory stabilized. Peace and quiet.
Of course, the real fix is to sort out the tool sending the bad data, but that’s someone else’s problem now, thankfully. I just needed to stop the bleeding. Spent the rest of the afternoon documenting what I found, what I did, and recommending the upstream fix. Another day, another fire drill with some ancient piece of tech. That’s how it goes sometimes. You just gotta roll up your sleeves and squash the ‘pulga’.
