Debugging anomalies

Concurrent algorithms have a way of working when observed and failing when not. Many times, a program that runs just fine in a debugger fails mysteriously in production environments. Sometimes, such failures come with a stack trace, and you can track it back to why it happened. But sometimes, failures are much more subtle with no clear indication of what went wrong.

Consider the monitor in the previous section. You might want to find out why SlowFunc hangs. You cannot really run it in a debugger and step through the code because you simply have no control over which invocation of the function hangs. But what you can do is print a stack trace when it happens. This is the nature of most anomalies in concurrent programs: you don’t know when it is going to happen, but you can usually tell that it did. So, you can print all sorts of diagnostic information to backtrack how the program got there. For instance, you can print the stack trace when the monitor raises...