Kern Sibbald wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 December 2009 19:44:10 Lucas B. Cohen wrote:
>> On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 19:17 +0100, Kern Sibbald wrote:
>>>> I'm wondering how
>>>> safe it is in practice to attach a debugger like gdb or dbx to a
>>>> running process to get a stacktrace.
>>> As far as I know it is perfectly safe.  I have done so *many* times, and
>>> after debugging detached with no harm to running programs.  It is not
>>> something I would normally attempt on a "production" program.
>>>
>>
>> The idea is to give a fair warning to uncautious users who would be
>> tempted to abuse the feature after having read its manpage. Your comment
>> on not normally attempting this in production makes me feel it's
>> appropriate.
>>
>> "Interactive use of btraceback is subject to the usual risks of live
>> debugging, which means it can cause Bacula to crash under rare and
>> unfortunate circumstances."
> 
> I don't know where you came up with the above quote, but though I would not 
> recommend using btraceback for "interactive" use, I don't believe the 
> conclusion that is drawn is correct.  It goes contrary to everything I wrote 
> you in the last email.

The first quote is taken from the Bacula Problem Resolution Guide.
The second one is my draft of btraceback's manual page. I'm sorry if I
misread you; so what is it, if not the risk of causing a daemon to crash
or otherwise misbehave, that makes you wary of using btraceback/gdb in a
production setting ?

Best,

-- 
Lucas B. Cohen

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting
than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edgar W. Dijkstra

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