Bugtation No.100
Thursday, August 6th, 2009The road to immortality is paved with memory dumps.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Archive for August 6th, 2009
Moving towards the Psi point
Thursday, August 6th, 2009The hierarchy of Ψ1, …, Ψ8, …, Ψ16, …, Ψ32, …, Ψ64, …, …, …, ΨΨ numbers where the subscript denotes the number of bits a memory address can have, so Ψ32 and Ψ64 are memorillion and quadrimemorillion of memory dumps respectively. We only need to figure out the meaning of Ψ0 and ΨΨ. Perhaps there is some meaning in Dirac notation here: <Ψ0|ΨΨ>. More on this later because I have to finish this week the book x64 Windows Debugging: Practical Foundations and write an errata file for the previous x86 version of the book series.
Note: Ψ is an M upside down.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
Trace Analysis Patterns (Part 9)
Thursday, August 6th, 2009There 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 components 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 -