Christopher Blizzard » Programming http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog I love you. Thu, 26 May 2011 20:29:33 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.4 “skid mark” http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2009/12/skid-mark/ http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2009/12/skid-mark/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:52:32 +0000 Christopher Blizzard http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=1753 Continue reading →]]> A new phrase that I learned yesterday. Probably something that’s been around computers for a long time, but it was my first exposure to it.

Basically a “skid mark” is something you leave in code as a signature so that in a crash dump you can figure out how you got there.

We’ve been doing a huge amount of work in Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 to reduce the number of crashes. For some crashes we have stack traces, but not a lot of data on how we got to that stack. So we’re actually checking in code changes and and shipping them into the wild to see how they change crash signatures.

The interesting thing is that it’s working – we’ve been able to track down some pretty serious crashes with this technique.

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