alt Hacker NewsI have a funny story about a windows IA-64 box.
I was working for a large bank and it was all windows, including production. We used to run WebSphere Application Server on Windows. I was looking for a dev server to run unit tests on, including integration tests which required an actual WebSphere instance. The infrastructure team said they had “a box” going spare and it turned out to be IA64 on Windows.
If my memory serves me correctly WebSphere only ran on windows for IA-64 up to 6 and we were running on 7.
I had to do a bit of hacking but I did manage to get it working using the dlls from the 6 version. It was fine for running integration tests and a pretty fast box considering.
Am I right to guess that neither your dev nor prod machines ran IA-64? If so that's not ideal, but beggars can't be choosers & a spare box from the infra team available right now is better than getting a box built to meet your exact specs available after the usual multi-quarter internal lead time.
Superficially it sounds a little crazy, but it's probably a lot less crazy than far more mainstream antipatterns (e.g. 'lets have our CI download all the dependencies from npm over the internet each time the build runs')!
Did running the unit tests on IA-64 ever flush out genuine issues that were 'working by accident' on x86?