I’ve implemented a specialised tree data structure for a ray tracing application. I’m using an std::list in each of the tree’s nodes to store data items. I have a problem where running the application, with this data structure in use, crashes not only the application, but freezes the whole OS (Windows 7). This occurs in release mode only; in debug mode it takes longer (as is expected) but works fine. I’m using Visual Studio 2010. Running (Ctrl+F5) or debugging (F5) in release mode both caused the full system crash.
From what I’ve found so far, different behaviour between release and debug mode seems to be attributed to memory leaks, as debug mode (from what I’ve understood) is a little more forgiving. However I’ve found nothing about a C++ application crashing the OS.
I’d just like to know under what circumstances such behaviour can occur, so I know where to look. It’s difficult to reduce the problem to something simple and trace the issue, because it’s in the nature of ray tracing to be highly parallel and work with a lot of data.
Oh, and the problem is not an infinite recursion causing a stack overflow. I made that happen intentionally and it did not crash the OS.
Did you check the memory usage in the debug mode ? Excessive memory usage and spilling over to swap would slow down the system like hell – your system might not have technically crashed – just become super slow. And in release mode, all that allocation would be happening at quite some speed – so you might want to look at the memory usage.
And as you said, a infinite recursion will not cause he OS to crash – it always leads to a segmentation fault.