Tuesday, November 17, 2009

To Laugh or To Cry?

I sat down this morning to write more concurrency tests for jSuneido, fully expecting to uncover more bugs. Amazingly, everything worked perfectly. I have to admit I was feeling pretty darn good, I was almost ready to claim victory. But as the saying goes, pride goes before a fall.

It was time for coffee so I figured I might as well let the tests run for a longer period. I came back to find ... the exact same error I've been fighting for the last week or more! I wouldn't have been surprised to uncover different bugs, but I could have sworn I had squashed this one.

It's bizarre that I keep coming back to this exact same error. I would expect concurrency errors to be more random. Even for a single bug I would expect it to show a variety of symptoms. I guess I shouldn't be complaining, consistency is often helpful to debugging.

I've obviously reduced the frequency of occurrence of the error. I just hope I can get the error to occur in less than 10 minutes of testing. Otherwise it's going to be a very slow debug cycle and I'll have lots of time to review the code!

So am I laughing or crying? Mostly laughing at the moment, but ask me again after I've spent a bunch more hours (or, heaven forbid, days) struggling to find the problem.

1 comment:

Jen said...

Argh! Tell me about it! Try like 2 freakin' weeks! Darn bugs! Which reminds me, I need your help tomorrow :o)