Angelo's Soapbox

DTrace could have saved the Vista Voice Recognition Demo

Looks like Microsoft has an unfair share of unfavorable visits from the demo gods. For example just last week a demo of the Voice recognition feature of Vista went horribly bad and a video of the failed demo was all over the net. Google Video , Slash Dot and YouTube all have helped to spread the video around. I just came across Microsoft's Larry Osterman's blog. He claims responsibility for the snafu and explains the details of why this went wrong. While there is a lot of good info in the blog that may be of interest to a analog audio engineer the following line in his blog caught my attention. The annoying thing about it was that the bug wasn't reproducible - every time he stepped through the code in the debugger, it worked perfectly, but it kept failing when run without any traces. I'm sure we all have faced similar problems. They seem to go away as soon as you attach a debugger to it or even add some custom instrumentation (printf) to the application. In this case the problem was occurring if they had a positive feedback loop and the problem was very time sensitive. Solaris 10 Dynamic Tracing or DTrace in short is absolutely the best tool in the market today to diagnose such problems. It frees you from having to do custom instrumentation and helps you diagnose problems in a live production setting without incurring the overhead of traditional debuggers. Now if only Vista had DTrace! Larry could have diagnosed the problem without having to incur the big cost of a stepping through the debugger. To learn more about DTrace see Solaris 10 Dynamic Tracing Users Guide DTrace Webcast - (shameless self promotion) Brendan Greggs DTrace Toolkit Tags: DTrace , Vista

Posted at 03:28PM Aug 01, 2006 by angelo in DTrace  |