I go to movies. Lots of movies. Usually I get popcorn or a drink. Not always, but usually. What can be counted on, however, is the movie theatre staff ensuring that instead of everybody waiting in a single line, and popping off the top like a queue, we all wait in 3 or 4 separate lines.

Why is this? It's stupid.

At the Tim Horton's in my building, they do it properly. One big line, 3 tills, and they just call the next person. The line moves so fast even with 30 people in it.

Why is that? It's smart.

If you've ever made a Debian mirror, you'll see it uses wget. This faces a similar problem. What it does, is make a list of all the files it needs to download, split the list into X equal groups (where X is defined in a config file, meaning the number of processes to use), write out each list to a file, one URL per line, then start up X wget processes with the URL file as the argument, which in turn downloads each file.

Flawed! One process gets stuck downloading some large file, which is the first one in that list, all the other processes finish, and there are 50 files left in the final list, and one process to finish downloading them all.

You see this problem in grocery stores as well. Same problem, and you're stuck trying to figure out the best line to be in. At the University of Alberta bookstore during the initial semester book buy frenzy, they do it properly. One big line, 15 tills! It works great.

I tend to notice these things now, and when it's stuff like this, it bothers me. Think about it next time you're in line somewhere.