I had a very frustrating day at work today … nothing was working right … even when it did work right, it wasn’t supposed to.

I’ve been trying to track down a bug in some software that only manifests when we put the system under a very heavy load. Unfortunately, a heavy load is very hard to simulate.

Luckily, our QA has a pretty solid test framework that will simulate 18 users performing 10 transaction each all at the same time.

Problem is, I can’t debug when the test framework is running. If I try to run the test framework in my debugger, there’s enough delay added by the debugger AND additional latency in the communications that the error I’m trying to fix doesn’t manifest (not to mention that the server I’m interacting with doesn’t have as much of a load on it).

My only option is to add logging code to the software and run the test framework over and over and over again.

I ran the test framework a few times in the morning and saw the error … I wanted to add a bit more diagnostic code to extract more information about the failure.

I ran the test framework again THREE more times … and not once did the error manifest.

I know the error is there … I just don’t know what I need to do to fix it yet. And if I can’t get it to manifest, I can’t refine the solution.

Darn frustrating.

[tags]Work, java, debugging[/tags]