[wildfly-dev] The art, science, and torture of debugging test suite hangs

[David M. Lloyd]

It's really a pain when you are developing a multifaceted change to the 
application server and it hangs.  Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can 
stick jconsole on there and figure out at least a general idea of what 
is going on, or reproduce the problem by running a test, a test class, 
or a test module in isolation with debugging turned on.  Sometimes 
you're not so lucky, or sometimes the hang happens in the manualmode 
test suite where you have to attach a debugger 9,000 times only to find 
out that the hang doesn't happen when you do that.

I think we should introduce a new build profile which activates the 
remote debugging port, but with suspend=n.  This would allow entire full 
test suite runs to be done while allowing debugger to be attached for 
exploratory surgery in the event that something goes wrong.  While it's 
possible that having debugging activated might actually prevent the hang 
you care about, at least there's a chance that something can be done.


-- 
- DML