Another Writeup; Heisenbug

If you can't wait for me to write it up, Tim Longo did a writeup of my talk for the forum that covers some bits the Gama writeup missed.  And all the other talks are written up as well.

In other news, I was crowing about Schizoid's mean-time-to-failure a while back.  But for the past few weeks it's been horrible!  We had a nasty heisenbug off the main thread, and it only showed up every five-to-twenty hours of soaking.  Every night I was adding more instrumentation (thank you for that cool-sounding term for printfs, Billy Zelsnack, and thanks to Brett Douville for telling me to man up and pull out the printfs instead of killing myself - I tell you, I've gotten so used to our modern tools that I forget how we used to have to debug in the old days), soaking, and slowly narrowing it down.  Finally got it, right before the show - (the collection of circumstances that had to combine to make it happen were staggering though at the bottom of it all there was some bad code by me) - and I'm now happy to say there are no known failures in the soak.  It is possibly the worst bug I've ever tracked down.

Comments

[Brett Douville]

Ha! Man up, indeed. What will really kill you some day is that putting in the printfs will cause the bug to disappear. In that case, leave in the printfs... unless that's a TCR violation. :)

[CDriK]

They got the same problem at my studio. They're blaming memory leaks and heisenbugs. It could be a lot of things.

[jvalenzu]

That sounds awesome. What was it?