Core dump epidemiology: fixing an 18-year-old bug

When rare infrastructure crashes kept hitting OpenAI's systems, engineers took an epidemiological approach — treating the problem like a disease outbreak by analyzing crash patterns across thousands of core dumps. They uncovered a two-part diagnosis: a hardware fault and an eighteen-year-old software bug embedded in the codebase. By analyzing their entire infrastructure instead of chasing individual incidents, they demonstrated how statistical debugging can solve rare, stubborn problems. The methodology offers a playbook for any team managing large-scale, complex systems.

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