Add blog post about flight recorders

Author: alexanderkyte

_posts/2018-08-03-flight-recorders.md

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+---
+layout: blog
+title: Houston, We’ve Had a Problem Here
+author: Alexander Kyte
+tags: [logging]
+---
+
+## Houston, We’ve Had a Problem Here ##
+
+### Bringing Flight Recorders to Mono ###
+
+There are few things as rewarding as printf-debugging a difficult problem.
+Sometimes though, they’re not an appropriate solution. A bug that only 
+reproduces after hours of use can lead to tens of gigabytes of logging files in
+the worst case. Or, even worse, you might have a Heisenbug. When you try to 
+print the variables involved in your bug, the IO involved prevents the race 
+from happening entirely. Left with no good way to debug the main problem, 
+you’re forced to read the code really carefully and put checks outside of 
+critical regions to check when the bug has happened. 
+
+### Prototyping a Solution ###
+
+This type of problem very often complained about with respect to the mono
+debugger. It can be hard to isolate whether a mono bug, a C# application bug,
+or debugger misuse were the cause of a failure. People find themselves trying 
+to understand what mono’s view of the world is, based on the output they see
+in their debuggers. Submitting a bug is hard work, as is arguing that the
+error is not between the keyboard and the chair. 
+
+It was this that motivated the creation of the debugger flight recorder. 
+A flight recorder, in software engineering, is a system that takes messages
+without overhead or waits and can print out the last hundred retained messages
+or so. The main use of it is to avoid filling up your disk, slowing down your
+application, or paying other costs associated with logging incredibly 
+verbosely around a problem. 
+
+The debugger’s existing logging was extracted into a number of functions that 
+created a global state machine for the debugger. These transitions were logged
+into the ring buffer of the flight recorder. While being rather mundane, it 
+proved useful for catching bugs that otherwise involved fear, uncertainty, 
+doubt, and code that is pushed to master to assert with good error messages 
+when a known bug is hit. 
+
+### Generalized Logging with the Flight Recorder ###
+
+Shortly later, we decided to bring the flight recorder mechanism into the big
+leagues. We were going to replace all of our logging with it, when it was 
+enabled. This was not trivial. While taking a global lock every time you log is
+very slow, lockless ring buffers were somehow slower. Something had to change.
+I was inspired by research that suggested that a dedicated thread with a message 
+inbox was more scalable than lockless compare-and-set data structures 
+(ffwd by S. Roghanchi - 2017). 
+
+Leveraging existing lockless message queues and threading primitives, and 
+patterns from our profiler, I created a very simple message-passing system.
+This message passing system was given some callbacks that would make a thread 
+to serve as a global flight recorder. All other threads dump their logs in a 
+wait-free manner into the queue, and the ring buffer drains the queue. 
+In short, a thread now owns the responsibility of managing all the logs.
+It scales incredibly well, and does not appear to interfere with race 
+conditions reproducing. 
+
+### Impact on You ###
+
+To use the flight recorder in your application today, export 
+`MONO_LOG_DEST=flight-recorder` and you will see the log suffix on crash or on
+shutdown. It’s really rather exciting, to have an application-level view of all
+of the steps that one would usually have to mentally trace while debugging. It’s
+freeing to no longer choose between logging and performance, between verbosity 
+and bug reproduction.
+
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