Question

I’m chasing a production bug that’s intermittent enough to be a real bastich to diagnose properly but frequent enough to be a legitimate nuisance for our customers. While I’m waiting for it to happen again on a machine set to spam the logfile with trace output, I’m trying to come up with a theory on what it could be.

Is there any way for competing file read/writes to create what amounts to a deadlock condition? For instance, let’s say I have Thread A that occasionally writes to config.xml, and Thread B that occasionally reads from it. Is there a set of circumstances that would cause Thread B to prevent Thread A from proceeding?

My thanks in advance to anybody who helps with this theoretical fishing expedition.

Edit: To answer Pyrolistical’s questions: the code isn’t using FileLock, and is running on a WinXP machine. Not asked, but probably worth noting: The production machines are running Java 1.5.

Answer 1

I’ve gotten some useful tips for chasing the underlying bug, but based on the responses I’ve gotten, it would seem the correct answer to the actual question is:

No.

Damn. That was anti-climactic.