Re: [boost] Stacktrace review: concern, probable solution and review news

Subject: Re: [boost] Stacktrace review: concern, probable solution and review news
From: Vladimir Batov (Vladimir.Batov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-12-23 18:00:11

Antony,

Thank you for your reply and patience. Much appreciated. Your 
description (below) of our deployment environment is 90% right on the 
money... the remaining 10% are merely minor details. Very impressive! 
You are not developing a MindReader library, are you? :-) You won't 
believe how much operators hate/shun binary files... anything 
non-textual that they can't read... it's irrational but ultimately they 
call the shots... if we want their business of course. :-)

And your code snippet is very straightforward, makes sense and pretty 
much what I need. Many thanks. I already voted for the inclusion of your 
lib... Can I now vote again with my other hand please? :-) I hope all 
goes well for your library and you personally. Can't wait to see you lib 
in Boost.

On 2016-12-24 06:08, Antony Polukhin wrote:
> 2016-12-22 23:06 GMT+03:00 Vladimir Batov 
> <Vladimir.Batov_at_[hidden]>:
>> On 12/22/2016 10:21 AM, Andrey Semashev wrote:
>>> 
>>> ... to save the backtrace to a file.
>> 
>> ... I might have missed that but dumping the
>> textual stack-trace to the log is still on the cards, right?
> 
> Actually, I think that Stacktrace must perfectly fit your needs.
> Here's how I understand your situation: you've got a big application,
> that runs 24/7 and is automatically restarted after a crash; a support
> team of non-developers that monitor it and send logs. It would be a
> disaster if your application hangs, so you need an async-signal-safe
> code. Sending corefiles is hard - application is big and support team
> is not trained to do that. Log files with a stacktrace would
> significantly help you in debugging.
> 
> Here's how you can use the stacktrace:
> 
> dump_stacktrace("/staktrace.txt"); // in signal handler, async signal 
> safe
> 
> ...
> // in main()
> if (filesystem::exists("/staktrace.txt")) {
>     std::ifstream ifs("/staktrace.txt");
>     ifs >> stacktrace_variable; // pseudo code, have not thought it
> fully through
>     log << stacktrace; // outputting stacktrace of previous crash with
> all the function names and source lines
>     ifs.close();
>     filesystem::remove("/staktrace.txt");
> }
> 
> This will give you the stacktrace of the previous crash in 100% safe
> manner that avoids hangs without any manual work from the support
> team.