Week 13 Update: Access Violation Fixes & Continued Testing

Overview

This week was primarily dedicated to resolving a new issue introduced by our recent deadlock fix. The changes that stabilized concurrency inadvertently caused intermittent access violations during simulation, prompting a deeper look at how shared state is accessed across components.

Access Violation Bug

• Origin of the Bug:
  • The access violation stemmed from shared objects being accessed after they were destroyed or invalidated. This was a side effect of refactored locking and resource management logic added during the deadlock fix.
  • In some edge cases, the compute service would attempt to access invocation-related data after it had already been cleaned up by another thread.
• Resolution:
  • We added stricter lifetime management and guard checks around all shared pointers and references to avoid use-after-free issues.
  • Additional locking and atomic operations were introduced in critical sections to ensure state consistency.
• Improved Error Detection:
  • We enhanced debug logging and enabled sanitizers in test builds to catch similar issues earlier in development cycles.

Continued Testing

After resolving the access violation, we resumed aggressive testing to ensure long-term stability:

• Stress & Edge Case Testing:
  • Ran prolonged simulations under varying workloads to ensure no regressions occurred.
  • Focused on scenarios involving concurrent function invocations, host saturation, and high-frequency state updates.
• Scheduler Validation:
  • Continued validating custom and baseline schedulers across different execution patterns to ensure correctness under the new synchronization logic.
• Test Coverage Improvements:
  • Extended our Google Test suite to include more defensive tests around lifecycle management and error handling.

Next Steps

• Thread Safety Audit:
  • Perform a complete audit of shared data structures to ensure thread-safe usage patterns across all modules.
• Benchmarking Prep:
  • Begin preparing the system for upcoming performance benchmarks by confirming that the system runs cleanly in extended-duration simulations.
• Release Readiness:
  • Start identifying remaining blockers for a potential first public or internal release of the scheduling framework.

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Though this week introduced new challenges, addressing the access violation was a crucial step toward building a robust, thread-safe simulation platform. We’re now on a much more stable foundation as we continue testing and look ahead to benchmarking and release.