Core dump epidemiology: fixing an 18-year-old bug

OpenAI engineers investigated unexplained service crashes in their Rockset data infrastructure by shifting from traditional debugging to an epidemiological approach. By analyzing a high-quality data set of core dumps rather than individual cases, they discovered that the crashes were caused by two distinct, unrelated issues: silent hardware corruption on a specific Azure host and an 18-year-old race condition in the GNU libunwind library. The team successfully resolved these issues by isolating the faulty hardware and switching to a more stable exception unwinder, highlighting the critical importance of robust observability and data-driven debugging in complex distributed systems.

(Source：OpenAI)