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There is an obvious pattern called Missing Component. We don’t see trace statements we expect and wonder whether the component was not loaded, its container ceased to exist or simply it wasn’t selected for tracing. In many support cases there is a trade-off between tracing everything and the size of trace files. Customers and engineers usually prefer smaller files to analyze. However in the case of predictable and reproducible issues with short duration we can always select all components or deselect a few (instead of selecting a few). Here is the article for Citrix CDF tracing best practices and it can be applied to other software traces as well:
We can find an example from Discontinuity pattern where the possibility of a sudden and silent gap in trace statements could happen because not all necessary componets were selected for tracing.
Sometimes, in cases when the missing component was selected for tracing but we don’t see any trace output from it other module traces can give us an indication, perhaps showing the load failure message. For example, Process Monitor tracing done in parallel can reveal load failures.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ TraceAnalysis.org -
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August 9th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
[…] (in formation) in the search of isomorphism (or more correctly, general morphism) similar to Missing Component pattern. It is not a coincidence that such pattern pairs can be formed. For example, it is […]
June 2nd, 2010 at 12:08 am
[…] absence of activity can be seen at a thread level or at a process level where it is similar to Missing Component pattern. The difference from the latter pattern is that we know for certain that we selected our […]
August 10th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
[…] such traces by their short time duration, missing anchor messages or missing messages from components necessary for analysis. My favourite example is user session initialization in a Citrix terminal […]
September 20th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
[…] call this pattern Guest Component and it is a different from Missing Component. Although in the latter pattern a missing component in one trace may appear in another but the […]