Solving random crashes

Question

I am getting random crashes on my C++ application, it may not crash for a month, and then crash 10 times in a hour, and sometimes it may crash on launch, while sometimes it may

Answer 1

These sorts of bugs are always tricky - unless you can reproduce the error then your only option is to make changes to your application so that extra information is logged, and then wait until the error happens again in the wild.

There is an excellent tool called Process Dumper that you can use to obtain a crash dump of a process that experiences an exception or exits unexpectedly - you could ask users to install that and configure rules for your application.

Alternatively if you don't want to ask users to install other applications you could have your application monitor for exceptions and create a dump itself by calling MiniDumpWriteDump.

The other option is to improve the logging, however figuring out what information to log (without just logging everything) can be tricky, and so it can take several iterations of crash - change logging to hunt down the problem.

As I said, these sorts of bugs are always tricky to diagnose - in my experience it generally involves hours and hours of peering through logs and crash dumps until suddenly you get that eureka moment where everything makes sense - the key is collecting the right information.