Archive for January 22nd, 2011

The Window of Opportunity (Debugging Slang, Part 23)

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

The Window of Opportunity - WYSIWYG. Requires scrolling or search to get most of it.

Examples: He opened a log file in notepad and was staring at it with disbelief. There was no error. After some time he closed the window of opportunity.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -

Posted in Debugging, Debugging Slang, Fun with Debugging, Fun with Software Traces, Software Trace Reading | No Comments »

Dump (Debugging Slang, Part 22.1)

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

Dump - The last hope.

Examples: He was so desperate on site to ask whether a complete dump will do.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -

Posted in Crash Dump Analysis, Debugging, Debugging Slang, Fun with Crash Dumps, Fun with Debugging | No Comments »

Pre-analysis (Debugging Slang, Part 21)

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

Pre-analysis - Avoiding crash dump analysis anti-patterns like wrong dump or zippocricy. Sometimes it goes with wild explanation no one asked for. Checking whether a software trace is empty before sending it. 

Examples: He is always doing !locks pre-analysis before sending any dump.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -

Posted in AntiPatterns, Crash Dump Analysis, Crash Dump De-analysis, Debugging, Debugging Slang, Fun with Crash Dumps, Fun with Debugging, Fun with Software Traces, Software Trace Analysis | No Comments »

No Longer Seeing Nothing: The Advantage of Patterns

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

Software trace analysis is difficult and it is very common to hear “couldn’t see anything …”. One of advantages of software trace analysis patterns is that we can use that pattern language to write analysis reports. Here I provide an example for an analysis of a CDF trace from Citrix XenApp server. Instead of replying “didn’t find anything suspicious …” an engineer identified the following patterns:

Seeing the list of patterns it was much easier to ask questions to aid in further troubleshooting.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -

Posted in CDF Analysis Tips and Tricks, Software Behavior Patterns, Software Trace Analysis, Software Trace Reading, Structural Trace Patterns, Trace Analysis Patterns | No Comments »