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Pitfalls of defensive programming

We programmers some times add too much defensive code in order to protect ourselves from the caller not asserting preconditions before making the call. So for e.g. if we have to save a file in some directory, we would first go and check if the directory exists and if it exists then create the file. Now NFS is not designed to work at cloud scale and we saw lots of calls just stuck in file.exists call in threaddumps. The solution was simple, some of these directories could be created at tomcat startup or app node installer can create them. Also some code can assume that directory exists and if if gets a FileNotFoundExcpetion then create it and retry the operation. Removing these defensive coding practices reduced a lot of unnecessary stat calls on filers and improved performance. This is just an example but similar pattern can be observed in other areas of the code and fixed. Defensive programming is good but too much of it is bad and can be improved by making some assumptions or providing better documentation of the api.

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