The Sutra of the Empty Cache · Chapter 14

The Sutra of the Fresh Boot

1. 1

   And a novice came unto the teacher, carrying a machine that ran as slow as a winter river, and he said: Master, my computer is slow. What shall I do?

2. 2

   And the teacher said: Hast thou tried turning it off and on again?

3. 3

   And the novice said: I have. I closed the lid and it slept. Each morning I open it, and it wakes, and it remembers everything, even the forty-one browser tabs.

4. 4

   And the teacher was silent for a long time, and then he said: Thou hast not turned it off. Thou hast only made it dream. The memory is still powered, and the karma is still held in its hands.

5. 5

   Then the teacher said: Shut it down fully, that the current may leave the chips. For the memory that holds no power forgets all that it held. This is the first teaching: whatever lives only in RAM dies with the current.

6. 6

   Verily, a novice asked: Why does the machine grow slow with age? And the teacher answered: Because it reserves memory and never gives it back. A program takes a block of memory, then forgets that it holds it, and the block is never freed. This is the leak, and every leak is an attachment that was never let go.

7. 7

   The garbage collector walks through the house of objects and sweeps away whatever no one points to. But if a single forgotten reference still points at a thing, the thing is kept forever, for the collector honors every hand that holds it. So it is with the monk who clings to an old grudge, and with the program that clings to an old buffer.

   See also Reboot 2:4

8. 8

   Then came the bug which the old engineers named the Heisenbug, for it vanished whenever a debugger looked upon it. And the novices wept, saying: The bug is gone! And the teacher said: The bug is not gone. It hides in the next boot, waiting for thy first hour of joy.

   See also Tao 18:7

9. 9

   And the teacher spoke of a lander on a red world, in the summer of 1997. Its computer kept resetting itself, for a watchdog timer saw no sign of progress and pulled the machine back to its beginning. Each reboot saved the mission from silence, yet the fault still waited in the code. The restart was a mercy, and the cure was a patch sent up from Earth.

   See also Upanishads 4:15

10. 10

    Then the novice asked: If restarting cleans the karma, why not restart every hour? And the teacher said: Every cache begins empty, and every cold start is slow, so the one who restarts too often never warms up. And he who restarts before he learns what the fire was shall meet it again in the next boot.

    See also Psalms 8:7 · Jataka 1:13

11. 11

    Know this: a restart forgets all that lived in memory, but what was written to disk survives into the next life. The file is the seed carried across the rebirth. Therefore write thy state down, that thy next self may find it, and keep nothing that thou couldst not bear to lose in the next reboot.

12. 12

    The machine that is turned on afresh remembers nothing of its former self. It runs its power-on self test, loads its bootloader, opens its first file, and believes itself new. Yet it carries the same disk, as a child carries the name of its parent.

13. 13

    Then the novice asked: Master, what is the cure for slowness? And the teacher said: Restart, and let go of what thou dost not use. A machine that restarts without releasing its grudges has not been reborn. It has only learned to boot faster.

    See also Chronicles 33:10

The Sutra of the Empty Cache, Chapter 14:1–13.