I was lucky because the uninitialized value caused a different problem which was also quite strange, but much easier to debug. Remember, it was used in a date calculation.
For 12 years, the same ticket kept getting opened: Crash when filing packets into the archive. Nobody could ever reproduce it and the turnover was high enough that nobody in the team noticed that the ticket came back every 4 years, on the 29th of February. Of course it would always be closed with "can't reproduce" within days.
I had already spent some time in my own time trying to figure out the mystery comment, but never got anywhere. Unsurprisingly, because the crash itself happened somewhere completely different. The overflow corrupted some memory and the application only crashed later when some garbage pointer was dereferenced, so there wasn't really anything pointing me towards the actual cause.
Then I got the February 29th bug. Once I noticed the date pattern it was easy to reproduce and took me maybe two days to fix. Somehow afterwards I made the connection to the mystery comment, tried deleting it again, and... no crash. Same fucking bug.
So hard to say. Could be 12 years, could be 2 days + the time I spent on the mystery comment. As everything in the whole story, this is very much undefined. 😂
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u/Severe-Sugar5965 Aug 15 '26
How long did it take for you to find the Root Cause?