7 ms·

“Artery chokes after 70 copies of Visual Studio”

155 points by distilled 12y ago

mnichloo 12y ago
What I want to know is this, what hellish workflow led to the discovery of this bug?
- larsberg 12y ago
  My guess would be that it's an automated build / deploy system that required some addon installed to run, so they had to run `devenv /build` instead of using msbuild. Then they saw this behavior on one of their build machines when something wasn't installed correctly and the process just terminated, after 71 retries... Source: I was on the visual studio environment team a decade ago, and Rube Goldberg himself could not design a build process that would surprise me, at this point.
  - mnichloo 12y ago
    That makes sense... I was imagining that there was some build process that froze VS 99% of the time and some poor developer was sitting at his desk silently crying into his coffee trying over and over to get his project to build so that he can go home for the weekend.
  - raverbashing 12y ago
    One of my personal corollaries: all build systems suck Some suck more, some less And most of the time it's overcomplicated.
    - achamayou 12y ago
      No one ever wants to build, all a developer really wants is a type checker.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- masklinn 12y ago
  One main project (open all day) and small projects throughout the week/month with a machine never shut down? I can see that happening easily at web agencies and the like.
  - prawks 12y ago
    Any more than 5 instances of VS running on one machine gives me pause. I can't imagine going into double-digits, let alone 50+. I can see 70 files or projects open, but not in VS. EDIT: Ah, seems I skipped the part where the additional instances are closed.
    - DougBTX 12y ago
      Step 2 in the reproduction case also includes shutting down the new instance, so I think there is only ever a maximum of two instances at a one time. Seems that the unusual bit is that 70 instances are opened without ever closing the very first instance.
    - ygra 12y ago
      My cat once managed to launch 167 instances ;-)
    - masklinn 12y ago
      It's not multiple instances running at the same time, step 2 kills an instance. It's one "main" instance running continuously, then opening and closing a second instance over and over.
- atesti 12y ago
  Maybe it happens if you click on a cs or sln file and then press shift and click somewhere else. This might select all sln or cs files and invoke open on all of them, launching many instances at once. Happened to me once with another programm
yread 12y ago
Why is this interesting?
- QuadDamaged 12y ago
  I run multiple instances of vs.net and don't reboot every week, In my case, I'm cycling through at least 10 instances a day. This bug report is actually interesting (to me).
  - yread 12y ago
    Yes, but do you shut them down ungracefully? Do you expect to read interesting bug reports on HN?
    - TallGuyShort 12y ago
      I find lots of unexpectedly interesting things on HN. Interesting bug, inspiring-ly excellent write-up. I wish I got more bug reports like this.
    - kcbanner 12y ago
      I do, they are entertaining.
      - chris_wot 12y ago
        Yes, well... try this one then: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702 Entitled "XL97: Data Not Returned from Query Using ORACLE Data Source", one of the solutions reads: Method 2: Move Your Mouse Pointer If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being returned to Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data has been returned to Microsoft Excel. I'm sure some large bank has employed a data operator to do this at some point. It's a job I guess.
        neurobro 12y ago
        In case people think you were being sarcastic (and maybe you were), a large bank used to pay me $10/hour to push F11, F7, F7, F2 for the first 2-3 hours of each day.
Serow225 12y ago
Now that's how bug reports should be written!
- raxen 12y ago
  Agreed but I was confused by the MS response of "Thank you for submitting feedback on Visual Studio and .NET Framework." It seems like the bug is in VS and not .NET. Are they that interweaved these days?
  - ygra 12y ago
    The bug report frontend is for both. The Thank you is just an automated response that it was seen. Generally, lots of the official replies on Connect seem to be either text building blocks or canned responses. Not terribly surprising, either, I might add.
  - petilon 12y ago
    The Developer Division at Microsoft is responsible for both and this is their boilerplate response.
  - Zenst 12y ago
    in 1998 I was working with VS and had a bug with OCX and was told that the bug was due to VS not working with the current IE version as well in places and was fixed in the new release of VS due out. So I'd say very interweaved if history has its design legacy mantra.
    - asveikau 12y ago
      IIRC Internet Explorer used to overwrite the shell DLLs which contain a lot of random helpers and stuff that is not strictly shell related but tempting to make your application depend on. I remember this being a frequent source of "app not working, probably works on the developer's machine" type issues, especially in the time period where this was changing a lot.
- nraynaud 12y ago
jheriko 12y ago
hehe.... i wonder if they will fix it or simply accuse you of being an idiot several times over before reading the bug report and realising its genuine. :P what i find much more interesting than this kind of bug though is that there are several possible ways to expose vs bugs with one step after making a new project in the current version...
- ygra 12y ago
  The issue has already been closed as Fixed.
  - bananas 12y ago
    Based on my experience with connect that doesn't mean it was fixed in the product version you reported it against or any future version.
    - merrua 12y ago
      They mention future version of 2013. So its gone to their bug reports database, to be prioritized rather than is fixed.
      - ygra 12y ago
        From the description of the resolution reasons, that'd be "Deferred".
        merrua 12y ago
        I'd imagine deferred, is less "pre-grooming" as "nice-to-have-some-time". But I dont work for MS.
stackcollision 12y ago
Is there a repository somewhere of really great bug reports like this? Something along the lines of "commits from last night".
- mburst 12y ago
  Not quite the same but there is http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/ http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/
  - thejosh 12y ago
    Hilarious, does this search for common swearwords?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - versk 12y ago
      Seems likely to be shit, fuck or stupid
dferlemann 12y ago
Instead, I had to hunt down the person who wrote bugs with only titles and severity level critical....
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  "unable to reproduce / not enough information" -> close. If users want you to fix a bug, they should assume you're an idiot and can't extrapolate what their problems is from the title alone.
  - jerf 12y ago
    "It depends". If I'm getting this out of a user support case, I can't really do that. The support person in question might get an earful... actually, tense correction, support people have gotten earfuls from me on the virtues of filing the moral equivalent of "it doesn't work"... but for the customer's sake I can't just smash the bug report closed and smile smugly.
kohanz 12y ago
Not that this is a major bug, but it makes me wonder why a bug report of this detailed nature (basically doing the debugging for Microsoft engineers) shouldn't be eligible for a bounty, just as exposed security flaws are. For this bug, it would be a very small or non-existent bounty since this use case affects almost no one, but what if someone found a major bug that was not a security issue, and worked out the cause and fix, as was done in this case? Is that so much less valuable than a security issue?
- jenscow 12y ago
  The bounty "prize" is you will eventually have a working product to use. If you don't report it, then there is slim chance of the bug being fixed.
  - rbanffy 12y ago
    > The bounty "prize" is you will eventually have a working product to use. While an IDE running under Windows is hardly what I would like to work with, a bug that manifests itself only on such extreme circumstances cannot be called a showstopper. I would worry more about other instances where this Peek() method is being misused like this, perhaps on other situations that happen more frequently than Visual Studio 2013 starts. As a prize, a Microsoft T-Shirt, a gift card and some public recognition wouldn't hurt. The person who reported this bug did a great job of pinpointing its cause.
    - RyJones 12y ago
      I sent a package of branded stuff to someone once - stuff I bought out of my own pocket at the company store - and got upbraided for sending such shitty gifts. Won't make that mistake again. I also worked for a startup where we had a handful of users that really went above and beyond reporting bugs. We sent them $25 amazon gift cards as thanks - the feedback was we were being cheap. One of those gift cards has yet to be spent, years later.
      - Stormcaller 12y ago
dodders 12y ago
From the workarounds tab: "Do not open more than 70 copies of Visual Studio..."
- rob-alarcon 12y ago
  haha, yeah, it's really funny: "Do not open more than 70 copies of Visual Studio and do not, in any case, choke the artery! What's wrong with you? Choking the artery! Have nothing better to do?"
  - luke-stanley 12y ago
    They might be wanting to run automated tests to find some other problem, and find after 70 tests, they get an error. So it's sensible to want to fix it.
- sounds 12y ago
  But only 2 are ever open at once.
Locke1689 12y ago
That explains it: this is a Schabse bug. He reports bugs like: when you have 4 levels of nested generics with an overriden indexed property going through ComImport, the modopts are incorrectly copied into the method signature, causing a runtime crash in the CLR. It's like having another tester on the C# team :)
- dev360 12y ago
  Or like having an aspbergers stalker?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
merrua 12y ago
Would the GetLinesFromFile() memory leak cause performance issues on anything outside of this example? Its hard to think of a broader usecase. Though I would suppose its annoying that it eats memory on an older machine. But since it will only be updated for VS 2013 that wont matter until the newer machines get old. Slight affect if doing long running performance testing?

155 points by distilled 12y ago

mnichloo 12y ago

What I want to know is this, what hellish workflow led to the discovery of this bug?

larsberg 12y ago
My guess would be that it's an automated build / deploy system that required some addon installed to run, so they had to run `devenv /build` instead of using msbuild. Then they saw this behavior on one of their build machines when something wasn't installed correctly and the process just terminated, after 71 retries... Source: I was on the visual studio environment team a decade ago, and Rube Goldberg himself could not design a build process that would surprise me, at this point.
- mnichloo 12y ago
  That makes sense... I was imagining that there was some build process that froze VS 99% of the time and some poor developer was sitting at his desk silently crying into his coffee trying over and over to get his project to build so that he can go home for the weekend.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  One of my personal corollaries: all build systems suck Some suck more, some less And most of the time it's overcomplicated.
  - achamayou 12y ago
    No one ever wants to build, all a developer really wants is a type checker.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
masklinn 12y ago
One main project (open all day) and small projects throughout the week/month with a machine never shut down? I can see that happening easily at web agencies and the like.
- prawks 12y ago
  Any more than 5 instances of VS running on one machine gives me pause. I can't imagine going into double-digits, let alone 50+. I can see 70 files or projects open, but not in VS. EDIT: Ah, seems I skipped the part where the additional instances are closed.
  - DougBTX 12y ago
    Step 2 in the reproduction case also includes shutting down the new instance, so I think there is only ever a maximum of two instances at a one time. Seems that the unusual bit is that 70 instances are opened without ever closing the very first instance.
  - ygra 12y ago
    My cat once managed to launch 167 instances ;-)
  - masklinn 12y ago
    It's not multiple instances running at the same time, step 2 kills an instance. It's one "main" instance running continuously, then opening and closing a second instance over and over.
atesti 12y ago
Maybe it happens if you click on a cs or sln file and then press shift and click somewhere else. This might select all sln or cs files and invoke open on all of them, launching many instances at once. Happened to me once with another programm

yread 12y ago

Why is this interesting?

QuadDamaged 12y ago
I run multiple instances of vs.net and don't reboot every week, In my case, I'm cycling through at least 10 instances a day. This bug report is actually interesting (to me).
- yread 12y ago
  Yes, but do you shut them down ungracefully? Do you expect to read interesting bug reports on HN?
  - TallGuyShort 12y ago
    I find lots of unexpectedly interesting things on HN. Interesting bug, inspiring-ly excellent write-up. I wish I got more bug reports like this.
  - kcbanner 12y ago
    I do, they are entertaining.
    - chris_wot 12y ago
      Yes, well... try this one then: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702 Entitled "XL97: Data Not Returned from Query Using ORACLE Data Source", one of the solutions reads: Method 2: Move Your Mouse Pointer If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being returned to Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data has been returned to Microsoft Excel. I'm sure some large bank has employed a data operator to do this at some point. It's a job I guess.
      - neurobro 12y ago
        In case people think you were being sarcastic (and maybe you were), a large bank used to pay me $10/hour to push F11, F7, F7, F2 for the first 2-3 hours of each day.

Serow225 12y ago

Now that's how bug reports should be written!

raxen 12y ago
Agreed but I was confused by the MS response of "Thank you for submitting feedback on Visual Studio and .NET Framework." It seems like the bug is in VS and not .NET. Are they that interweaved these days?
- ygra 12y ago
  The bug report frontend is for both. The Thank you is just an automated response that it was seen. Generally, lots of the official replies on Connect seem to be either text building blocks or canned responses. Not terribly surprising, either, I might add.
- petilon 12y ago
  The Developer Division at Microsoft is responsible for both and this is their boilerplate response.
- Zenst 12y ago
  in 1998 I was working with VS and had a bug with OCX and was told that the bug was due to VS not working with the current IE version as well in places and was fixed in the new release of VS due out. So I'd say very interweaved if history has its design legacy mantra.
  - asveikau 12y ago
    IIRC Internet Explorer used to overwrite the shell DLLs which contain a lot of random helpers and stuff that is not strictly shell related but tempting to make your application depend on. I remember this being a frequent source of "app not working, probably works on the developer's machine" type issues, especially in the time period where this was changing a lot.
nraynaud 12y ago

jheriko 12y ago

hehe.... i wonder if they will fix it or simply accuse you of being an idiot several times over before reading the bug report and realising its genuine. :P what i find much more interesting than this kind of bug though is that there are several possible ways to expose vs bugs with one step after making a new project in the current version...

ygra 12y ago
The issue has already been closed as Fixed.
- bananas 12y ago
  Based on my experience with connect that doesn't mean it was fixed in the product version you reported it against or any future version.
  - merrua 12y ago
    They mention future version of 2013. So its gone to their bug reports database, to be prioritized rather than is fixed.
    - ygra 12y ago
      From the description of the resolution reasons, that'd be "Deferred".
      - merrua 12y ago
        I'd imagine deferred, is less "pre-grooming" as "nice-to-have-some-time". But I dont work for MS.

stackcollision 12y ago

Is there a repository somewhere of really great bug reports like this? Something along the lines of "commits from last night".

mburst 12y ago
Not quite the same but there is http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/ http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/
- thejosh 12y ago
  Hilarious, does this search for common swearwords?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - versk 12y ago
    Seems likely to be shit, fuck or stupid

dferlemann 12y ago

Instead, I had to hunt down the person who wrote bugs with only titles and severity level critical....

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
"unable to reproduce / not enough information" -> close. If users want you to fix a bug, they should assume you're an idiot and can't extrapolate what their problems is from the title alone.
- jerf 12y ago
  "It depends". If I'm getting this out of a user support case, I can't really do that. The support person in question might get an earful... actually, tense correction, support people have gotten earfuls from me on the virtues of filing the moral equivalent of "it doesn't work"... but for the customer's sake I can't just smash the bug report closed and smile smugly.

kohanz 12y ago

Not that this is a major bug, but it makes me wonder why a bug report of this detailed nature (basically doing the debugging for Microsoft engineers) shouldn't be eligible for a bounty, just as exposed security flaws are. For this bug, it would be a very small or non-existent bounty since this use case affects almost no one, but what if someone found a major bug that was not a security issue, and worked out the cause and fix, as was done in this case? Is that so much less valuable than a security issue?

jenscow 12y ago
The bounty "prize" is you will eventually have a working product to use. If you don't report it, then there is slim chance of the bug being fixed.
- rbanffy 12y ago
  > The bounty "prize" is you will eventually have a working product to use. While an IDE running under Windows is hardly what I would like to work with, a bug that manifests itself only on such extreme circumstances cannot be called a showstopper. I would worry more about other instances where this Peek() method is being misused like this, perhaps on other situations that happen more frequently than Visual Studio 2013 starts. As a prize, a Microsoft T-Shirt, a gift card and some public recognition wouldn't hurt. The person who reported this bug did a great job of pinpointing its cause.
  - RyJones 12y ago
    I sent a package of branded stuff to someone once - stuff I bought out of my own pocket at the company store - and got upbraided for sending such shitty gifts. Won't make that mistake again. I also worked for a startup where we had a handful of users that really went above and beyond reporting bugs. We sent them $25 amazon gift cards as thanks - the feedback was we were being cheap. One of those gift cards has yet to be spent, years later.
    - Stormcaller 12y ago

dodders 12y ago

From the workarounds tab: "Do not open more than 70 copies of Visual Studio..."

rob-alarcon 12y ago
haha, yeah, it's really funny: "Do not open more than 70 copies of Visual Studio and do not, in any case, choke the artery! What's wrong with you? Choking the artery! Have nothing better to do?"
- luke-stanley 12y ago
  They might be wanting to run automated tests to find some other problem, and find after 70 tests, they get an error. So it's sensible to want to fix it.
sounds 12y ago
But only 2 are ever open at once.

Locke1689 12y ago

That explains it: this is a Schabse bug. He reports bugs like: when you have 4 levels of nested generics with an overriden indexed property going through ComImport, the modopts are incorrectly copied into the method signature, causing a runtime crash in the CLR. It's like having another tester on the C# team :)

dev360 12y ago
Or like having an aspbergers stalker?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

merrua 12y ago

Would the GetLinesFromFile() memory leak cause performance issues on anything outside of this example? Its hard to think of a broader usecase. Though I would suppose its annoying that it eats memory on an older machine. But since it will only be updated for VS 2013 that wont matter until the newer machines get old. Slight affect if doing long running performance testing?