How to debug code causing computer to crash

Question

I have written a program to control several scientific instruments which ends up going through several thousand loops as it runs. This all told tends to take about half an hour to run.

I have run into a weird bug/issue in which about every other time I run the program, the program freezes the computer and I have to hard restart. When I just do a small number of loops to test the program I never have problems, it's only when I try full data runs that it crashes off and on.

Is there anyway to trace the error if it only occurs intermittently? Is there anyway to catch what the error is before the computer freezes? Could it be related to running the code in debug mode and not in release?

I am using Visual C++ 2013 on a Win 7 64-bit machine. All the various includes are the 64-bit versions. I can post the code if that would be helpful, but I must warn that it is very long. Thanks

computer freezes? that is nasty... have you tried to run that on other computer/ virtual system? have you monitored the memory consumption and so on? — V-X, Feb 07 '14 at 00:15
probably has to do with interactions with the drivers for the "scientific instruments" — thang, Feb 07 '14 at 00:16
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/413477/is-there-a-good-valgrind-substitute-for-windows — Mitch Wheat, Feb 07 '14 at 13:54

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 07 '14 at 00:13

Being the test procedure so long, maybe the best "in house" way to deal with it is to write on a file the needed debug infos at almost every step the program takes.

Be sure to close the file each time, otherwise you will probably lose your data on freezing.

Sure it will take a lot of more time, but if you are lucky and the error has a certain regularity, after a couple of check you can go with conditional breakpoints and debug the usual way.

If I had to bet on the cause, I will say this is a memory leak. Hope this helps

How to debug code causing computer to crash

1 Answers1