macrobug

I have a producer-consumer relationship between two processes involved in my tools. (One of them is the Symbian OS emulator; the other is the development environment).

The ‘producer’ produces events and information which get sent to the consumer for later analysis.

Today some of my events were going missing. Every so often, 3846 events would simply not be received by the consumer. Mysterious. I tried everything I could think of to work out why it was 3846: relating it to all the typical computer-like things. Is it divisible by 256? No. What’s 4096-3846: 250. Mystery. And I just couldn’t figure out why those events weren’t being received.

Anyway, it turned out that it was because I had a terminal window open, running another consumer. Every so often it woke up – and, as designed – consumed some of my data. I’d forgotten I’d left this running a few hours ago when I was debugging something.

I still have no idea why it always claimed exactly 3846 events before going back to sleep, but at least it doesn’t do it any more. (Maybe that was how many events it could grab in a standard Windows timeslice, before Windows gave my other process a chance to run).

Sigh.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Techie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.