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Core dump epidemiology: fixing an 18-year-old bug

Using population-level analysis to debug tricky crashes in our data infrastructure.

Jun 30Published Jun 30, 2026 · First seen Jul 10, 2026 · Updated Jul 11, 2026 · 1 link

Threads

  • The C++ language provides low-level access to the CPU, which is good for performance and efficiency, but it means that application bugs can lead to invalid memory accesses and segfaults.OpenAI

  • We manually inspected more cores and found some additional examples, but that process was too labor-intensive to give us a trustworthy data set.OpenAI

  • Stack frames that are no longer active (because their function has returned) will get clobbered by the signal handler, except for the last 128 bytes.OpenAI

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