Debugging instance of another thread altering my data
- by Mick
I have a huge global array of structures. Some regions of the array are tied to individual threads and those threads can modify their regions of the array without having to use critical sections. But there is one special region of the array which all threads may have access to. The code that accesses these parts of the array needs to carefully use critical sections (each array element has its own critical section) to prevent any possibility of two threads writing to the structure simultaneously.
Now I have a mysterious bug I am trying to chase, it is occurring unpredictably and very infrequently. It seems that one of the structures is being filled with some incorrect number. One obvious explanation is that another thread has accidentally been allowed to set this number when it should be excluded from doing so.
Unfortunately it seems close to impossible to track this bug. The array element in which the bad data appears is different each time. What I would love to be able to do is set some kind of trap for the bug as follows: I would enter a critical section for array element N, then I know that no other thread should be able to touch the data, then (until I exit the critical section) set some kind of flag to a debugging tool saying "if any other thread attempts to change the data here please break and show me the offending patch of source code"... but I suspect no such tool exists... or does it? Or is there some completely different debugging methodology that I should be employing.
