Spent all day battling against a race condition, and boy do they suck. Nothing seems repeatable about the errors and every test you write seems to pass. What kind of beast was I running up against? One of a high-volume nature that would only rear it’s head when the system was under a large strain of course!

When you are faced with one of these suckers the best thing you can do is just turn to your logs, and challenge every line of code your looking at.

• Am I certain this exception was raised from the same process that says it didn’t complete?
• Is the database the source of the race?
• How much time has passed between statement A and statement B; with that in mind what could have changed to make it fail that was guarded against elsewhere?

These are the kind of questions I ask to get going when faced with one of these buggers. Parallel code is by no means easy, and no language truly frees you completely from all of the problems related to it. As time passes you begin to grow your experience with race conditions and can begin spotting and narrow down where these problems lay buried in your code.