Heisenbug
//ˈhaɪzənˌbʌɡ//
"Heisenbug" in a Sentence (3 examples)
I recently encountered a particularly infuriating Heisenbug. A large program, when given a large input, was just mysteriously dying. Of course, I ran it under the debugger. The mystery deepened: the program returned quietly to the debugger.
Except for pointer messups in C on my side, the Heisenbugs I've come across were hardly ever caused by _me_.
There are multiple perf related issues like this that are hard to track down. They are borderline heisenbugs that are possibly race conditions, so bisecting doesn't work and even things like enablibg^([sic]) ftrace will make the issue go away (or crash ftrace itself).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.