Too Much Sex

My group got a bug report today from one of our customers. If you did a search on their site for "sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex", then it would take down the site. You had to have at least 16 occurences of the word "sex" in order to trigger the problem.

The problem was due to a 32-bit numeric overflow in the cost estimation of a spelling correction feature. Normally the cost would have been estimated as too expensive, and so we would have ignored the query. But because it overflowed to zero, the code happily skipped into a bottomless abyss of wasted effort.

The ironic part is that the only reason the spelling correction feature was triggered in the first place is because the site actually has no pages that contain the word "sex".

The weird part is that the site sells toys for kids. You have to wonder who would go to a children's toy site and search for "sex" to the sixteenth power. The consensus in the group is that it was probably some kind of crawler or aggregator site that was merely passing along queries that it got from some other source.