Well it's not that simple... Because whoever wrote that made it way too complicated (and the production version has been tweaked without updating the dev too)

A clean rewrite with some guard clauses helped remove the haduken ifs and actually zipping the file outside of the zipped directory helped a lot

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 6 points 13 hours ago

I mean, I have to say I've hastened my own demise (in program terms) by over-engineering something that should be simple. Sometimes adding protective guardrails actually causes errors when something changes.

[–] Quantenteilchen@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Am I understanding that last part correctly?

[...] and actually zipping the file outside of the zipped directory helped a lot

Did they just automatically create a backup zip-bomb in their script‽

[–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 8 points 11 hours ago

I oversimplified it but the actual process was to zip files to send to an FTP server

The cron zipped the files to send in the same directory as the zipped files, then sent the zip, then deleted the zip

Looks fine, right? But what if the FTP server is slow and uploading take more time than the hourly cron dispatch? You now have a second script that zip all the folder, with the previous zip file, which will slow down the upload, etc...

I believe may have been started by an FTP upload erroring out and forcing an early return without having a cleanup, and progressively got worse

... I suppose this happened. The logs were actually broken and didn't actually add the message part of the error object, and only logging the memory address to it