Okay, let’s talk about this little experiment I ran, the one I nicknamed the “longestpenis” project. Not what you might think, hold on! It was all about seeing how long I could keep a particular piece of code, like, really long, running without a break.
Getting Started
So, the whole idea kicked off kinda randomly. I was looking at some old code I wrote years back, just a simple script, nothing fancy. And I thought, hey, wonder how long this thing could actually stay running if I just let it go? Like, could it outlast my old laptop? Could it run for months? It became a bit of a personal challenge, you know? Just pure curiosity, mostly. Didn’t have a big goal, just wanted to see the limit.
The Setup and the Grind
First off, I needed a dedicated machine. Dug out an ancient desktop from the closet, wiped it clean, and put a barebones Linux on it. Nothing else, just the OS and the script I wanted to run. The script itself wasn’t doing much, just logging a timestamp every minute to a file. Simple. The real trick was keeping the machine and the process alive.
Keeping it Alive:
- Checked the power cord like, a million times. Made sure it wouldn’t get kicked.
- Plugged it into a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) after the first unexpected power flicker nearly gave me a heart attack a week in. That little box saved my butt more than once.
- Disabled all automatic updates. Yeah, probably dumb from a security standpoint for anything important, but this was a closed box doing nothing critical. Updates mean reboots, and reboots mean failure for this particular silly goal.
- Monitored the log file size. Had to set up a cleanup task so the hard drive wouldn’t fill up after a few months. Learned that the hard way when it choked after about 10 weeks the first time. Had to restart. Damn it.
It was tedious, honestly. Just checking on it every day. Peeking at the log file to see the latest timestamp. Making sure the old machine hadn’t just decided to die overnight. The fan noise became like background music in my office.
Bumps in the Road
Oh man, there were bumps. Lots of them.
One time, the power went out for like 4 hours. The UPS held for maybe 30 minutes, then, poof. Back to square one. That was frustrating. Felt like weeks of effort just gone.
Another time, the network card decided to just… stop working? No idea why. The script was still running locally, but I couldn’t remote in to check on it easily. Had to hook up a monitor and keyboard like it was 1999. Fixed it, but it was a hassle.
And then there was the time the script itself just froze. No error, no crash log, just stopped writing timestamps. Had to kill it and restart. Still don’t know exactly why it happened. Maybe some weird memory leak I was too lazy to debug properly in that old code.
The End Result?
So, what was the longest run? I think my best streak was around 7 months. Maybe a bit longer, I’d have to check the final log file somewhere. It wasn’t infinity, that’s for sure. Eventually, the old power supply in that desktop just gave up the ghost with a sad little pop. Game over.
Was it useful? Nah, not really. Did I learn anything profound? Probably not, other than old hardware eventually dies and power grids aren’t perfectly reliable. But it was kinda fun in a weird, obsessive way. Just seeing how long I could push that stupid, simple task. That was the whole point of the “longestpenis” run, just a dumb endurance test for a piece of code on junk hardware. Kept me occupied, I guess.
