Multithreaded Debugging

When the program mishandles scenario(s) where two or more threads share a resource, it leads to multithreaded issues. Depending on the language and the platform, threads can share various resources (variables, files, locks, etc.). Each thread must be mindful that a shared resource must be handled carefully. Ensuring that no other thread is accessing it simultaneously when a thread modifies a shared resource is vital.

Some common symptoms of multithreading issues are crashes, hangs, corruption, etc. Also, another critical symptom in addition to the above is nondeterminism or inconsistency of the symptom where the crash or the hang may only happen sometimes. This course covers how to handle crashes and deadlocks in their lessons. Here, we’ll discuss some general ideas and guidelines.

Pattern to debug multithreaded issues

For multithreading issues, our efforts are mostly to understand how the shared resource is accessed at various ...