Needle in a haystack

Been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently. That's mainly because I'm currently running through some tests for the first iteration of an update that will drastically change the architecture of the Esendex Messaging System. I can't go into detail about the change, but my current tests run into a very intermittent failure.

At irregular intervals one of the services hangs: just totally stops responding, and because it's multithreaded the log files aren't much help. Actually, its worse than looking for a needle in a haystack, as at least in that case you know what you're looking for.

It first presented itself after sending only 100 messages, then after 2,000. An initial investigation didn't shine any light on anything so I sent some more messages. It hasn't failed again yet, and I've currently sent 15,000 through. No code change either, so the error is still in there waiting to be found.

Frustrating is not the word.