I have a application which randomly freezes, including the IDE and it's driving me mad. That makes me wonder:
What's a good general strategy for finding the cause of random freezes?
If you are wanting to check from outside of a running app then I would potentially use the sysinternals.com toolset from Mark Russonivich, the perfmon tool allows you to trace file / registry access and check the trace for delays - and what is being accessed at that time. It will show the DLL call stack at that time with the right symbols can is useful for debugging problems external to an application that are causing delays. (I've used it to find out that an I/O filter associated to a security suite was the reason an application was piccking up a number of 1.5sec delays.)
If you're lucky, you can run your code in a debugger until it freezes, then stop the debugger to find the offending line of code. But if it were that easy, you probably wouldn't be asking for advice. :-)
Two strategies that can be used together are to "divide and conquer" and "leave bread crumbs."
Divide and conquer: Comment out increasingly larger portions of your code. If it still freezes, you've reduced the amount of code that might be responsible for causing the freeze. Caveat: eventually you'll comment out some code and the program will not freeze. This doesn't mean that last bit of code is necessarily responsible for the freeze; it's just somehow involved. Put it back and comment out something else.
Leave bread crumbs: Make your program tell you where it is and what it's doing as it executes. Display a message, add to a log file, make a sound, or send a packet over the network. Is the execution path as you expected? What was the last thing it was doing before it froze? Again, be aware that the last message may have come from a different thread than the one responsible for freezing the program, but as you get closer to the cause you'll adjust what and where the code logs.
You're probably doing things in the UI thread when you shouldn't be.
I would install the UserDump tool, and follow these instructions for generating a user dump of the application....
Once you have the user dump, you can use WinDbg, or cdb to inspect the threads, stacks, and locks, etc.
Often I find hangs are caused by locked mutexes or things like that.
The good general strategy is, run the program until it hangs. Then attach a debugger to it and see what's going on. In a GUI program, you're most interested in what the UI thread is doing.
You say the application hangs the IDE. This isn't supposed to happen, and I imagine it means the program is putting so much strain on the OS (perhaps CPU load or memory) that the whole system is struggling.
Try running it until it hangs, going back to the IDE, and clicking the Stop button. You may have to be really patient. If the IDE is really permanently stuck, then you'll have to give more details about your situation to get useful help.
I am trying to help a client with a problem, but I am running out of ideas. They have a custom, written in house application that runs on a schedule, but it crashes. I don't know how long it has been like this, so I don't think I can trace the crashes back to any particular software updates. The most unfortunate part is there is no longer any source code for the VB6 DLL which contains the meat of the logic.
This VB6 DLL is kicked off by 2-3 function calls from a VB Script. Obviously, I can modify the VB Script to add error logging, but I'm not having much luck getting quality information to pinpoint the source of the crash. I have put logging messages on either side of all of the function calls and determined which of the calls is causing the crash. However, nothing is ever returned in the err object because the call is crashing wscript.exe.
I'm not sure if there is anything else I can do. Any ideas?
Edit: The main reason I care, even though I don't have the source code is that there may be some external factor causing the crash (insufficient credentials, locked file, etc). I have checked the log file that is created in drwtsn32.log as a result of wscript.exe crashing, and the only information I get is an "Access Violation".
I first tend to think this is something to do with security permissions, but couldn't this also be a memory access violation?
You may consider using one of the Sysinternals tools if you truly think this is a problem with the environment such as file permissions. I once used Filemon to figure out all the files my application was touching and discovered a problem that way.
You may also want to do a quick sanity check with Dependency Walker to make sure you are actually loading the DLL files you think you are. I have seen the wrong version of the C runtime being loaded and causing a mysterious crash.
Depending on the scope of the application, your client might want to consider a rewrite. Without source code, they will eventually be forced to do so anyway when something else changes.
It's always possible to use a debugger - either directly on the PC that's running the crashing app or on a memory dump - to determine what's happening to a greater or lesser extent. In this case, where the code is VB6, that may not be very helpful because you'll only get useful information at the Win32 level.
Ultimately, if you don't have the source code then will finding out where the bug is really help? You won't be able to fix it anyway unless you can avoid that code path for ever in the calling script.
You could use the debugging tools for windows. Which might help you pinpoint the error, but without the source to fix it, won't do you much good.
A lazier way would be to call the dll from code (not a script) so you can at least see what is causing the issue and inspect the err object. You still won't be able to fix it, unless the problem is that it is being called incorrectly.
The guy of Coding The Wheel has a pretty interesting series about building an online poker bot which is full of serious technical info, a lot of which is concerned with how to get into existing applications and mess with them, which is, in some way, what you want to do.
Specifically, he has an article on using WinDbg to get at important info, one on how to bend function calls to your own code and one on injecting DLLs in other processes. These techniques might help to find and maybe work around or fix the crash, although I guess it's still a tough call.
There are a couple of tools that may be helpful. First, you can use dependency walker to do a runtime profile of your app:
http://www.dependencywalker.com/
There is a profile menu and you probably want to make sure that the follow child processes option is checked. This will do two things. First, it will allow you to see all of the lib versions that get pulled in. This can be helpful for some problems. Second, the runtime profile uses the debug memory manager when it runs the child processes. So, you will be able to see if buffers are getting overrun and a little bit of information about that.
Another useful tool is process monitor from Mark Russinovich:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx
This tool will report all file, registry and thread operations. This will help you determine if any you are bumping into file or registry credential issues.
Process explorer gives you a lot of the same information:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
This is also a Russinovich tool. I find that it is a bit easier to look at some data through this tool.
Finally, using debugging tools for windows or dev studio can give you some insight into where the errors are occurring.
Access violation is almost always a memory error - all the more likely in this case because its random crashing (permissions would likely be more obviously reproducible). In the case of a dll it could be either
There's an error in the code in the dll itself - this could be something like a memory allocation error or even a simple loop boundary condition error.
There's an error when the dll tries to link out to another dll on the system. This will generally be caused by a mismatch between dll versions on the machine.
Your first step should be to try and get a reproducible crash condition. If you don't have a set of circumstances that will crash the system then you cannot know when you have fixed it.
I would then install the system on a clean machine and attempt to reproduce the error on that. Run a monitor and check precisely what other files (dlls etc) are open when the program crashes. I have seen code that crashes on a hyperthreaded Pentium but not on an earlier one - so restoring an old machine as a testbed may be a good option to cover that one. Varying the amount of ram in the machine is also worthwhile.
Hopefully these steps might give you a clue. Hopefully it will be an environment problem and so can be avoided by using the right version of windows, dlls etc. However if you're still stuck with the crash at this point with no good clues then your options are either to rewrite or attempt to hunt down the problem further by debugging the dll at assembler lever or dissassembling it. If you are not familiar with assembly code then both of these are long-shots and it's difficult to see what you will gain - and either option is likely to be a massive time-sink. Myself I have in the past, when faced with a particularly low-level high intensity problem like this advertised on one of the 'coder for hire' websites and looked for someone with specialist knowledge. Again you will need a reproducible error to be able to do this.
In the long run a dll without source code will have to be replaced. Paying a specialist with assembly skills to analyse the functions and provide you with flowcharts may well be worthwhile considering. It is good business practice to do this sooner in a controlled manner than later - like after the machine it is running on has crashed and that version of windows is no longer easily available.
You may want to try using Resource Hacker you may have luck de-compiling the in house application. it may not give you the full source code but at least maybe some more info about what the app is doing, which also may help you determine your culrpit.
Add the maximum possible RAM to the machine
This simple and cheap hack has work for me in the past. Of course YMMV.
Reverse engineering is one possibility, although a tough one.
In theory you can decompile and even debug/trace a compiled VB6 application - this is the easy part, modifying it without source, in all but the most simple cases, is the hard part.
Free compilers/decompilers:
VB decompilers
VB debuggers
Rewrite would be, in most cases, a more successful and faster way to solve the problem.
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I've been a software developer for over twenty years, programming in C, Perl, SQL, Java, PHP, JavaScript, and recently Python. I've never had a problem I could not debug using some careful thought, and well-placed debugging print statements.
I respect that many people say that my techniques are primitive, and using a real debugger in an IDE is much better. Yet from my observation, IDE users don't appear to debug faster or more successfully than I can, using my stone knives and bear skins. I'm sincerely open to learning the right tools, I've just never been shown a compelling advantage to using visual debuggers.
Moreover, I have never read a tutorial or book that showed how to debug effectively using an IDE, beyond the basics of how to set breakpoints and display the contents of variables.
What am I missing? What makes IDE debugging tools so much more effective than thoughtful use of diagnostic print statements?
Can you suggest resources (tutorials, books, screencasts) that show the finer techniques of IDE debugging?
Sweet answers! Thanks much to everyone for taking the time. Very illuminating. I voted up many, and voted none down.
Some notable points:
Debuggers can help me do ad hoc inspection or alteration of variables, code, or any other aspect of the runtime environment, whereas manual debugging requires me to stop, edit, and re-execute the application (possibly requiring recompilation).
Debuggers can attach to a running process or use a crash dump, whereas with manual debugging, "steps to reproduce" a defect are necessary.
Debuggers can display complex data structures, multi-threaded environments, or full runtime stacks easily and in a more readable manner.
Debuggers offer many ways to reduce the time and repetitive work to do almost any debugging tasks.
Visual debuggers and console debuggers are both useful, and have many features in common.
A visual debugger integrated into an IDE also gives you convenient access to smart editing and all the other features of the IDE, in a single integrated development environment (hence the name).
Some examples of some abilities that an IDE debugger will give you over trace messages in code:
View the call stack at any point in time, giving you a context for your current stack frame.
Step into libraries that you are not able to re-compile for the purposes of adding traces (assuming you have access to the debug symbols)
Change variable values while the program is running
Edit and continue - the ability to change code while it is running and immediately see the results of the change
Be able to watch variables, seeing when they change
Be able to skip or repeat sections of code, to see how the code will perform. This allows you to test out theoretical changes before making them.
Examine memory contents in real-time
Alert you when certain exceptions are thrown, even if they are handled by the application.
Conditional breakpointing; stopping the application only in exceptional circumstances to allow you to analyse the stack and variables.
View the thread context in multi-threaded applications, which can be difficult to achieve with tracing (as the traces from different threads will be interleaved in the output).
In summary, print statements are (generally) static and you'll need to re-compile to get additional information if your original statements weren't detailed enough. The IDE removes this static barrier, giving you a dynamic toolkit at your fingertips.
When I first started coding, I couldn't understand what the big deal with debuggers was and I thought I could achieve anything with tracing (granted, that was on unix and the debugger was GDB). But once you learn how to properly use a graphical debugger, you don't want to go back to print statements.
An IDE debugger lets you change the
values of variables at run-time.
An IDE
debugger lets you see the value of
variables you didn't know you wanted
to see when execution began.
An IDE
debugger lets you see the call stack
and examine the state of the
function passed weird values.
(think this function is called from
hundreds of places, you don't know
where these weird values are coming
from)
An IDE debugger lets you
conditionally break execution at any
point in code, based on a condition,
not a line number.
An IDE debugger will let you examine the state of the program in the case of an unhandled exception instead of just crapping out.
Here's one thing that you definitely cannot debug with "print" statement, which is when a customer brings you memory dump and says "your program crashed, can you tell me why?"
Print statements all through your code reduces readability.
Adding and removing them for debug purposes only is time consuming
Debuggers track the call stack making it easy to see where you are
Variables can be modified on the fly
Adhoc commands can be executed during a pause in execution to assist diagnosing
Can be used IN CONJUNCTION with print statements : Debug.Write("...")
I think debugging using print statements is a lost art, and very important for every developer to learn. Once you know how to do that, certain classes of bugs become much easier to debug that way than through an IDE. Programmers who know this technique also have a really good feel of what's useful information to put in a log message (not to mention you'll actually end up reading the log) for non-debugging purposes as well.
That said, you really should know how to use the step-through debugger, since for a different class of bugs it is WAY easier. I'll leave it up to the other excellent answers already posted to explain why :)
Off the top of my head:
Debugging complex objects - Debuggers allow you to step deep into an object's innards. If your object has, say, an array of array of complex objects, print statements will only get you so far.
The ability to step past code - Debuggers will also allow you to skip past code you don't want to execute. True, you could do this manually as well, but it's that much more code you have to inject.
As alternative to debug in IDE you can try great Google Chrome extension PHP Console with php library that allows to:
See errors & exception in Chrome JavaScript console & in notification popups.
Dump any type variable.
Execute PHP code remotely.
Protect access by password.
Group console logs by request.
Jump to error file:line in your text editor.
Copy error/debug data to clipboard (for testers).
I haven't been developing for nearly 20 years, but I find that using a IDE / debugger I can :
see all kinds of things I might not have thought to have included in a print statement
step through code to see if it matches the path I thought it would take
set variables to certain values to make code take certain branches
One reason to use the IDE might be that modern IDEs support more than simple breakpoints. For example, Visual Studio offers the following advanced debugging features:
define conditional breakpoints (break only if a condition is met, or only on the n-th time the statement at the breakpoint is executed)
break on an unhandled exception or whenever a (specific) ecxeption is to be thrown
change variable while debugging
repeating a piece of code by setting the next line to be executed
etc.
Also, when using the debugger, you won't have to remove all your print statements once you have finished debugging.
In my experience, simple printouts have one huge advantage that no one seems to mention.
The problem with an IDE debugger is that everything happens at real time. You halt the program at a certain time, then you step through the steps one at a time and it is impossible to go back if you suddenly want to see what happened before. This is completley at odds with how our brain works. The brain collects information, and gradually forms an oppinion. It might be necessary to iterate the events several times in doing so, but once you have stepped past a certain point, you cannot go back.
In contrast to this, a selected series of printouts/logging gives you a "spatial projection of the temporal events". It gives you a complete story of what happened, and you can go back and fourth several times very easily by just scrolling up and down. It makes it easy to answer questions like "did A occur before B happened". It can make you see patterns you wernt even looking for.
So in my experience. IDE and debuggers are fantastic tools to solve simple problems when something in one single call-stack went wrong, and explore the current state of the machine at a certain crash.
However, when we approach more difficoult problems where gradual changing of state is involved. Where for example one algorithm corrupted a data structure, that in turn caused anohter algorithm to fail. Or if we want to answer questions like "how often do this happen", "do things happen in the order and in the way as I imagine them to happen". etc. Then the "old fashined" logging/printout technique has a clear advantage.
The best things is to use either technique when it is most suitable, for example use logging/printouts to get to some bugs, and pause at a breakpoint where we need to explore the current state more in detail.
There are also hybrid approaches. For example, when you do console.log(object) you get a data-structure widget in the log that you can expand and explore more in detail.This is many times a clear advantage over a "dead" text log.
One thing that I'm surprised I haven't seen in another answer is that the 2 debugging methods are not mutually exclusive.
printf debugging can work quite nicely even if you're using a standard debugger (whether IDE based or not). In particular with a logging framework so you can leave all or most of in the released product to help with diagnosing customer problems.
As noted in pretty much all the other answers here, the key nice thing about a standard debugger is that it allows you to more easily examine (and potentially change) the details of the program state. You don't have to know up front what you might want to look at - it's all available at your fingertips (more or less).
Because debugging multi-threaded applications with print statements will drive you bananas. Yes you can still do it with print statements but you'd need a lot of them and unravelling the sequential print out of statements to emulate the multi-threaded executiong would take a long long time.
Human brains are only single-threaded unfortunately.
Since you asked for pointers to books... As far as Windows debugging goes, John Robbins has several editions of a good book on Windows debugging:
Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Windows
Note that the most recent edition (Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications) is .NET only, so you might want an older one (like in the first link) if you want native code debugging (it covers both .NET and native).
I personally feel the answer is as simple as "A integrated debugger/IDE gives you a wealth of different information quickly without the need for punching in commands. The information tends to be there in front of you without you haven't tell it what to show you.
The ease in which the information can be retrieved is what makes them better than just command-line debugging, or "printf" debugging.
Advantages of a debugger over a printf (note not an IDE debugger but any debugger)
Can set watchpoints.
This is one of my favourite ways of finding memory corruptions
Can debug a binary that you can't recompile at the moment
Can debug a binary that takes a long time to recompile
Can change variables on the fly
Can call functions on the fly
Doesn't have the problem where debug statemenets are not flushed and hence timing issue can not be debugged acuratly
Debuggers help with core dumps, print statements dont'
This is what I use most on VS.NET debugging windows:
Call stack, which is also a great way to figure out someone else's code
Locals & Watches.
Immediate window, which is basically a C# console and also lets me change variable contents, initialize stuff etc.
The ability to skip a line, set the next statement to be executed somewhere else.
The ability to hover over variables and have a tool-tip showing me their values.
In summary, it gives me a 360 degree view of the state of my executing code, not just a small window.
Never found a book teaching this kind of stuff, but then again, it seems to be quite simple, it's pretty much WYSIWYG.
A debugger can attach to a running process
Often easier to debug threaded code from a debugger
With an IDE debugger you can see the values of ALL the variables in the current scope (all the way up the call stack) whenever you halt execution.
Print statements can be great but dumping so much information to the screen at any given place can produce a whole lot of print statements.
Also, many IDE debuggers let you type in and evaluate methods, and evaluate members while you are halted, which further increases the amount of print statements you'd have to do.
I do feel that debuggers are better for some languages than for others however...
My general opinion is that IDE debuggers are absolutely, amazingly wonderful for managed languages like Java or C#, are fairly useful for C++, and are not very useful for scripting languages like Python (but it could be that I just haven't tried a good debugger for any scripting languages yet).
I absolutely love the debugger in IntelliJ IDEA when I do Java development. I just use print statements when I use Python.
As someone said above: Debugger != IDE.
gdb and (back in the day) TurboDebugger (stand-alone) work just fine for the languages they support[ed], thank you. (or an even older technology: Clipper debugger linked into the xBase executable itself) -- none of these required an IDE
Also, though C/++ coding is more rare, printf statements sometimes mask off the very bug you are trying to find! (initialization problems in auto vars on the stack, for instance, or memory allocation/alignment)
Finally, as others stated, you can use both. Some real-time-ish problems almost require a print, or at least a judicious "*video_dbg = ( is_good ? '+' : '-');" somewhere into video memory. My age is showing, this was under DOS :-)
TMTOWTDI
In addition to much of what the other posters have said, I really like stepping through one line at a time along with the computer, as it forces me to think about one line at a time. Often I will catch the bug without even looking at variable values simply because I am forced to look at it as I click the 'next line' button. However, I don't think my answer will help you, Bill, because you probably have this skill already.
As far as learning resources go, I haven't used any -- I just explore all the menus and options.
Is this even real question from real programmer?
Anyone who spent even 5 mins debugging with print statements and debugging with IDE - it will OCCUR to him/her without even asking!
I've used both prints and IDEs for debugging and I would much rather debug using an IDE. The only time for me when that doesn't work is in time critical situations (like debugging online games) where you litter the code with print statements and then look at the log files after it has gone horribly wrong. Then if you still cannot figure it out, add more prints and repeat.
Just wanted to mention a useful feature of a console debugger vs printf and vs debugger in an IDE.
You can attach to a remote application (obvioustly, compiled in DEBUG mode) and inspect its state dumping the debugger output to a file using POSIX tee utility. Compared to printf, you can choose where to output the state in run-time.
It helped me a lot when I was debugging Adobe Flash applications deployed in an agressive environment. You just need to define some actions that print required state in each breakpoint, start the console debugger with fdb | tee output.log, and walk through some breakpoints. After that you can print the log and analyse the information by thorough comparison of the state in different breakpoints.
Unfortunatelly, this feature [logging to a file] is rarely available in GUI debuggers, making developers compare the state of objects in their head.
By the way, my opinion is that one should plan where and what to debug before staring a debugger.
Well another thing is that if you join a new old project and nobody really knows how the code is doing what it's doing, then you can't debug by echoing variables/objects/... b/c you have no idea what code is executed at all.
At my job I am facing exactly that kind of situation and visual XDebuging helps me getting an idea about what is going on and where, at all.
Best regards
Raffael
In addition to the many things that have been already mentioned, one of the most important advantages of a debugger over printf is that using printf statements assumes that you know in which function the bug resides. In many cases you don't, so you have to make a few guesses and add print statements to many other functions in order to localise it. The bug may be in framework code or somewhere far removed from where you think it is. In a debugger it is far easier to set breakpoints to examine the state in different areas of the code and at different points in time.
Also, a decent debugger will let you do printf-style debugging by attaching conditions and actions to breakpoints, so that you still retain the benefits of printf debugging, but without modifying the code.
Debugging in an IDE is invaluable in an environment where error logs and shell access are unavailable, such as a shared host. In that case, an IDE with a remote debugger is the only tool which allows you to do simple things such as view stderr or stdout.
A problem with using print statements is it makes a mess of your code. IE, you have a function with 10 parts to it and you know it crashes somewhere, but you're not sure where. So you add in 10 extra print statements to pinpoint where the bug is. Once you've found and solved your bug, you now have to clean up by removing all of those print statements. Maybe you'll do that. Maybe you'll forget and it'll end up in production and your user's console will be full of debug prints.
Wauw, do I like this question. I never dared to pose it...
It seems that people just have different ways of working.
For me what works best is:
Having a solid mind model of my code, including memory management
Using instrumentation (like print statements) to follow what's happening.
I've earned my living programming for over 40 years now, working at non-trivial technical and scientific applications in C++ and Python daily, and I have the personal experience that a debugger doesn't help me a bit.
I don't say that's good. I don't say that's bad. I just want to share it.
It's not just debugging. An IDE helps you build better software faster in a lot of ways:
refactoring tools
intellisense to make api's more discoverable, or remind of exact spelling/case of familiar items(not much use if you've used the same system for 15 years, but that's rare)
save on typing by autocompleting variable and class names
find certain kinds of errors before you even start to compile
Automatically jump to variable/method/class declarations/definitions, even if they're not in the same file or folder.
Break on unhandled and handled exceptions
I could go on.
Im sure this has happened to folks before, something works in debug mode, you compile in release, and something breaks.
This happened to me while working on a Embedded XP environment, the best way i found to do it really was to write a log file to determine where it would go wrong.
What are your experiences/ discoveries trying to tackle an annoying Release-mode bug?
Make sure you have good debug symbols available (you can do this even with a release build, even on embedded devices). You should be able to get a stack trace and hopefully the values of some variables. A good knowledge of assembly language is probably also useful at this point.
My experience is that generally the bug is related to code that is near the area of breakage. That is to say, if you are seeing an issue arising in the function "LoadConfigInfoFromFile" then probably you should start by closely analysing that for issues, rather than "DrawControlsOnScreen", if you know what I mean. "Spooky action at a distance" type bugs do not tend to arise often (although when they do, they tend to be a major bear).
Tracefile is always a good idea.
When it's about crashes, I'm using adplus, which is part of debugging tools for windows. basically what adplus does, is, it attaches windbg to the executable you're monitoring. When the application crashes, you get a crash dump and a log file. You can load the crash dump in your preferred debugger and find out, which instruction lead to the crash.
As release builds are heavily optimized compared to debug builds, the way you compile your code affects its behaviour. This is basically true when crashes in multithreaded code happen in the release version but not the debug version. adplus and windbg helped me, to find out, where this happened.
ADPlus is explained here:
httx://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B286350&x=15&y=12
Basically what you have to do is:
1. Download and install WinDbg into C:\debuggers
httx://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx
Start your application
open a cmd and cd to c:\debuggers
start adplus like this:
"adplus.bat -crash your_exe.exe"
reproduce the crash
analyze the crashdump in vs2005 or in windbg
If it's only a small portion of the application that needs debugging then you can change those source files only to be built without optimisations. Presumably you generate debug info for all builds, and so this makes the application run mostly as it would in release, but allows you to debug the interesting parts properly.
How about using Trace statements. They are there for Release mode value checking.
Trace.WriteLine(myVar);
I agree on log file debugging to narrow it down.
I've used "Entering FunctionName" "Leaving FunctionName" until I can find what method it enters before the crash. Then I add more log messages re-compile and re-release.
Besides playing with turning off optimization and/or turning on debug information for your Release build as pauldoo said, a log file will good data can really help. I once wrote a "trace" app that would capture trace logs for the app if it was running when the release build started (otherwise the results would go to the debugger's output window if running under the debugger). I was able to have end-users email me log files from them reproducing the bugs they were seeing, and it was the only way I would have found the problem in at least one case.
Though it's probably not usable in an embedded environment, I've had good luck with WinDbg for debugging release-mode Windows applications. Even if the application is not compiled with symbol information, you can at least get a usable stack trace and plenty of other useful crash information.
You could also copy your debug symbols to the production environment even if it's compiled in relase mode
Here's an article with more information
If you problem is synchronization related dumping log in the file might be problematic.
In this case i usually will use some big array of string and dump this to screen/file after the problem was reproduces.
This is of course depend on your memory restriction, sometime i use just few symbols and numbers to store in the array if the memory on the platform is limited. Reading such logs is not a big pleasure, but sometimes this is the only choice.