Heisenbug, noun

[jducoeur]

"A computer error that goes away every time you look at it closely, making it difficult to diagnose."

As, for example, spending the evening trying to figure out why your Internet connection has become flaky -- only to realize in the morning that the cablemodem is plugged into the light switch. D'oh...

Comments

[ilaine-dcmrn.livejournal.com]

You are reminding me of the link() system call bug I ran across years ago. It was insufficiently atomic, resulting sometimes in a caller being told it had won a race it had not.

[jducoeur]

Ouch. Good reminder of why I've become so deeply enamored of the Actor Model for -- well, pretty much anything of scale. Having an architecture where, if you follow the rules (not a trivial caveat) threading issues simply don't arise is a *huge* comfort.

But even there, I'm still dependent on the system libraries not sabotaging things from the get-go...