Category Archives: Bugs

Reflections on My Tech Career – Part 2

Posted on brucedawson

This is second and final part of the story of how my career as a software developer unfolded (part 1 is here). In this half I work at four different companies in the Seattle area, make my mark, and then … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Quadratic, Xbox 360, xperf | Tagged , | 18 Comments

Finding a VS Code Memory Leak

Posted on brucedawson

In 2021 I found a huge memory leak in VS code, totalling around 64 GB when I first saw it, but with no actual limit on how high it could go. I found this leak despite two obstacles that should … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Rants | Tagged , | 17 Comments

Google Maps Doesn’t Know How Street Addresses Work

Posted on brucedawson

(or actually they do, but they don’t use this knowledge effectively) Update, April 26, 2025: the address fix for W 6th Ave is live, mostly. Going forward I wish that Google Maps would make it harder to get bad data … Continue reading →

Posted in Rants | Tagged | 14 Comments

Determinism Bugs, Part Two, Kernel32.dll

Posted on brucedawson

It was literally the day after I cracked the __FILE__ determinism bug that I hit a completely different build determinism issue. I was asked to investigate why the Chrome build number reported for Chrome crashes on Windows 11 was lagging … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Symbols | Tagged | 19 Comments

Two Deterministic Build Bugs

Posted on brucedawson

‘Twas the week before Christmas and I ran across a deterministic-build bug. And then another one. One was in Chromium, and the other was in Microsoft Windows. It seemed like a weird coincidence so I thought I’d write about both … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Programming | Tagged | 14 Comments

Finding Windows HANDLE leaks, in Chromium and others

Posted on brucedawson

Three years ago I found a 32 GB memory leak caused by CcmExec.exe failing to close process handles. That bug is fixed, but ever since then I have had the handles column in  Windows Task Manager enabled, just in case … Continue reading →

Posted in uiforetw, xperf | Tagged | 20 Comments

The Easy Ones – Three Bugs Hiding in the Open

Posted on brucedawson

I write a lot about investigations into tricky bugs – CPU defects, kernel bugs, transient 4-GB memory allocations – but most bugs are not that esoteric. Sometimes tracking down a bug is as simple as paying attention to server dashboards, … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Performance | Tagged | 17 Comments

GDI leaks and the importance of luck

Posted on brucedawson

In May 2019 I was asked to look at a potentially serious Chrome bug. I initially misdiagnosed it as unimportant, thus wasting two valuable weeks, and when I rejoined the investigation it was the number one browser-process crash in Chrome’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 25 Comments

Bugs I Got Other Companies to Fix in 2013

Posted on brucedawson

Over the course of a year I fix a lot of bugs – that’s part of my job. But I’m not going to write about that. Instead I want to write about bugs that I found in other companies’ code, … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 12 Comments

How to Report a VC++ Code-Gen Bug

Posted on brucedawson

My coworkers recently found a bug in the x64 code generated by Visual C++. This bug exists in VC++ 2010 to VC++ 2013 RC. We put in a workaround (the traditional one of disabling optimizations for the afflicted function) and … Continue reading →

Posted in Visual Studio | Tagged | 10 Comments