A hardware problem looks to have been the culprit behind the train chaos that led to countless delays, cancellations and a swarm of angry commuters in recent weeks.
Siemens made some modifications to the hardware in one of the servers controlled by railway maintenance firm, Banedanmark, this morning and the S-train issues seem to have been solved.
The problems first surfaced on February 13, but the issue culminated in earnest on Thursday and Friday last week when trains throughout the city were delayed and whole lines cancelled as Banedanmark and Siemens technicians scrambled to locate and fix the problem.
“There wasn’t a pattern in the lapses: not in terms of when they happened or the load they put on the servers,” Claus B Christiansen, a Banedanmark section head, told Ingeniøren newspaper.
READ MORE: Fewer S-trains on the rails today
Servers functioning properly
According to the technicians, it seems that the hardware in one of the servers was defect and was unable to transfer tasks to the other server when it became overloaded, leading to longer and longer response times.
“That meant that we didn’t get the information from the system and we had to stop all the trains,” Christiansen said.
While monitoring the servers’ power use and processor activity, technicians noticed that one server used more electricity and processing power than the other, thus indicating a hardware malfunction.
The servers are once again carrying equal loads after being replaced.
