I have a multithreaded app that is very stable on all my test machines and seems to be stable for almost every one of my users (based on no complaints of crashes). The app crashes frequently for one user, though, who was kind enough to send crash reports. All the crash reports (~10 consecutive reports) look essentially identical:
Date/Time: 2010-04-06 11:44:56.106 -0700
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.6.3 (10D573)
Report Version: 6
Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
Thread 0 Crashed: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90ab98d4 __CFBasicHashRehash + 3348
1 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90adf610 CFBasicHashRemoveValue + 1264
2 com.apple.CoreText 0x94e0069c TCFMutableSet::Intersect(__CFSet const*) const + 126
3 com.apple.CoreText 0x94dfe465 TDescriptorSource::CopyMandatoryMatchableRequest(__CFDictionary const*, __CFSet const*) + 115
4 com.apple.CoreText 0x94dfdda6 TDescriptorSource::CopyDescriptorsForRequest(__CFDictionary const*, __CFSet const*, long (*)(void const*, void const*, void*), void*, unsigned long) const + 40
5 com.apple.CoreText 0x94e00377 TDescriptor::CreateMatchingDescriptors(__CFSet const*, unsigned long) const + 135
6 com.apple.AppKit 0x961f5952 __NSFontFactoryWithName + 904
7 com.apple.AppKit 0x961f54f0 +[NSFont fontWithName:size:] + 39
(....more text follows)
First, I spent a long time investigating [NSFont fontWithName:size:]. I figured that maybe the user's fonts were screwed up somehow, so that [NSFont fontWithName:size:] was requesting something non-existent and failing for that reason. I added a bunch of code using [[NSFontManager sharedFontManager] availableFontNamesWithTraits:NSItalicFontMask] to check for font availability in advance. Sadly, these changes didn't fix the problem.
I've now noticed that I forgot to remove some debugging breakpoints, including _NSLockError, [NSException raise], and objc_exception_throw. However, the app was definitely built using "Release" as the active build configuration. I assume that using the "Release" configuration prevents setting of any breakpoints--but then again I am not sure exactly how breakpoints work or whether the program needs to be run from within gdb for breakpoints to have any effect.
My questions are: could my having left the breakpoints set be the cause of the crashes observed by the user? If so, why would the breakpoints cause a problem only for this one user? If not, has anybody else had similar problems with [NSFont fontWithName:size:]?
I will probably just try removing the breakpoints and sending back to the user, but I'm not sure how much currency I have left with that user. And I'd like to understand more generally whether leaving the breakpoints set could possibly cause a problem (when the app is built using "Release" configuration).
