> The crashes/bugs I deal with are rarely straight down failures, they are often the 1 out of 100 runs kind, so printf debugging is the only way to go really.

> The crashes/bugs I deal with are rarely straight down failures, they are often the 1 out of 100 runs kind, so printf debugging is the only way to go really. Another thing I’ve found helpful, is to write out a “system state dump” (say in JSON) to a file whenever certain errors happen. Like we had a production system that was randomly hanging and running out of DB connections. So now whenever the DB connection pool is exhausted, it dumps a JSON file to S3 listing the status of every DB connection, including the stack dump of the thread that owns it, the HTTP request that thread is serving, the user account, etc. Once we did that, it went from “we don’t understand why this application is randomly falling over” to “oh this is the thing that is consistently triggering it” When it writes a dump, it then starts a “lockout period” in which it won’t write any further dumps even if the error reoccurs. Don’t want to make a meltdown worse by getting bogged down endlessly writing out diagnostics.