"Years ago," writes Maxime, "we found ourselves plagued with a brand new, unusably sluggish website. Most of the team blamed the esoteric VMCMWTH-based architecture (i.e. View-Model-Controller-Model-What-The-Huuhhhhh) that was pioneered by the Chief Developer. But the Chief Developer and the CTO (who also happened to be his uncle), blamed the hardware. More specifically, it was the 'inferior, off brand' CPU."

"Now despite the fact that this 'inferior, off brand' CPU commanded over 40% of the market, and that no one had ever experienced any performance problems on it ever, the powers-that-be refused to even consider the possibility that the non-performance was a result of their poorly-designed system."

"Replacing all of the production servers to get a new CPU was extremely expensive – especially when it would come out of Network Operation's much-needed budget – and obviously wouldn't do anything except delay resolving the actual problem. After a few clandestine meetings with network operations, I thought up a novel way to deliver a CPU upgrade..."

#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/smp.h>


static char *cpuname = "HyperTurbo 256-bit, AwesomeCache enabled";

int init_module() {
    loff_t i;

    for (i=0; i < nr_cpu_ids; i++) {
        strcpy((&cpu_data(i))->x86_model_id, cpuname);
    }

    return 0;
}

"Sadly, after the Chief Developer ran his own series of tests, he found that the performance was tremendously improved and that no other changes were needed. A year or so (and many customer complaints) later, they finally decided to 'upgrade' the website."

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