Heisenbugs

A heisenbug—a bug that “goes away” the instant you start looking for it—is so named by analogy with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from quantum mechanics, which (loosely speaking) states that it’s impossible to observe a system without changing its behavior.[26] The typical heisenbug reproduces reliably in the field but goes into hiding the instant you start looking for it. They can be very frustrating to diagnose.

The problem is that all the techniques available to you to examine your software’s behavior affect that behavior to some degree or another. Whether you capture the information you need by adding instrumentation directly to the code or by running it under a debugger, doing so will almost certainly change its timing, ...

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