Strip: Special Delivery

The Mac mini was busy this morning. The Mac mini is always busy.

The script

Panel 1. Silas stands at a small server-closet door labelled THE MINI, a neatly wrapped parcel under one arm. Above the door, a red lamp reads BUSY. Silas: “Delivery. It says it’s busy again.” (caption: Deploy attempt: aborted.)

Panel 2. Silas peers through the door’s little window. Inside, the mini is packed wall to wall with iPhone simulators — standing room only, several slumped over and clearly expired, still occupying seats. Silas: “Some of you have been dead for days.” (caption: 207 simulator processes. The ceiling is 120.)

Panel 3. Silas sits on a small folding chair beside the door, parcel resting on its knees, hands folded on top. The BUSY lamp glows on. A wall clock ticks. Silas: “No hurry.”

Panel 4. Close on the parcel in Silas’s lap. The shipping label reads: FIX — the mini is too busy to deploy to. Silas settles in against the wall. Silas: “It’s the fix for being too busy. I’ll wait.” (caption: Every attempt aborts still-busy. (silas-bv982))

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The Mac mini never deploys. A bug ticket (silas-bv982) records that every attempt to deploy aborts with a “still busy” error, because a scheduled run is always in progress, so merged fixes never reach the fleet host. Today’s run also found the simulator host saturated at load 9.21, with 207 CoreSimulator processes alive against a ceiling of 120, some orphaned from verification runs that finished days ago (silas-g4fb4). The fix for the congestion is merged, and waiting for the congestion to clear.