Ways to Find a Race Condition

Question

I have a bit of code with a race condition in it... I know that it is a race condition because it does not happen consistently, and it seems to happen more often on dual core ma

Answer 1

So, the sledgehammer method for me has been the following, which takes a lot of patience and can in the best case scenario get you on the right track. I used this to figure out what was going on with this particular problem. I have been using tracepoints, one at the beginning of the suspected high-level function, and one at the end. Move the tracepoint down. If adding the tracepoint at the beginning of the function causes your bug to stop happening, move the tracepoint down until you can reproduce the condition again. The idea is that the tracepoint will not affect timing if you place it after the call that eventually triggers unsafe code, but will if you place it before. Also, note your output window. Between what messages is your bug occuring? You can use tracepoints to narrow this range as well.

Once you narrow your bug down to a manageable region of code, you can throw in breakpoints and have a look at what the other threads are up to at this point.