Re: Very strange debugging problem
"Peter Olcott" <NoSpam@SeeScreen.com> wrote in message
news:gf5Ci.86140$Mu5.21970@newsfe15.phx...
I have a windows console program that interfaces with a library that
interfaces with a hardware device. I run the same unmodified program with
the same input and get different results on different trials. My program is
the same, the test data is the same, yet different runs produce different
results.
There are only two sorts of things that I can think of that could cause
this:
(1) The state of the hardware device changes between runs.
(2) Some really weird memory error that causes my program to run correctly
75% of this time and fail other times.
Does anyone have any ideas on how I can narrow this down better?
Other possible sources of inconsistent behavior are improperly synchronized
multithreading and coincidences between the timing of hardware and software
actions. Maybe floating point rounding should be included, if your
"inconsistent results" are numeric. To hopefully narrow it down consider
adding numerous TRACE statements (or a logging file) so you can look through
the flow of results to see where differences appear.