Crash Cows
Source: Jake Poznanski In the 1980s, my mentor Sergei was writing software for an SM-1800, a Soviet clone of the PDP-11. The microcomputer was just installed at a railroad station near Sverdlovsk, a major shipping center for the U.S.S.R. at the time. The new system was designed to route train cars and cargo to their intended destinations, but there was a nasty bug that was causing random failures and crashes. The crashes would always occur once everyone had gone home for the night, but despite extensive investigation, the computer always performed flawlessly during manual and automatic testing procedures the next day. Usually this indicates a race condition or some other concurrency bug that only manifests itself under certain circumstances. Tired of late night phone calls from the…
