Production Bugs

Summary This postmortem examines a common database connection management challenge in Delphi/FireDac applications transitioning from SQL Server (with MARS) to PostgreSQL compatibility. The core issue involves multiple concurrent result sets on a single database connection, where the default FireDac behavior conflicts with RAD development patterns that encourage declarative component configuration. The problem manifests when developers … Read more

Summary A production issue was identified in an iOS Progressive Web App (PWA) where a white gap appeared at the bottom of the screen, below the bottom navigation bar. Despite using viewport-fit=cover and 100dvh, the layout failed to extend into the safe area inset (the home indicator zone). This resulted in a broken user experience … Read more

Summary The Utf8JsonWriter you create with new(File.Create(…)) owns the underlying `FileStream, and disposing the writer does not close that stream. The file remains locked, so the subsequent File.OpenRead fails with “the process cannot access the file … because it is being used by another process.” The fix is to also dispose the FileStream (or use … Read more

Summary A production system experienced cache fragmentation and reduced hit rates due to non-deterministic URL generation. The issue stemmed from a legacy Perl CGI implementation using query_form to construct query strings. Because Perl hashes are unordered collections, the resulting URL parameters were being generated in a different sequence for identical functional requests. This caused HTTP … Read more

Summary A production application experienced silent data loss and partial reads on a serial port following a major dependency upgrade from Boost 1.64 to 1.84. The failure was specifically linked to the interaction between the Asio reactor (epoll) and the existing file descriptors within a complex event loop. The issue was masked in isolated test … Read more

Summary A documentation workflow bottleneck was identified where engineers required a way to embed ASCII diagrams directly within reStructuredText (RST) files that would automatically render into high-quality graphical assets during the Sphinx build process. The goal was to avoid the overhead of external image files while maintaining the “documentation as code” principle, similar to how … Read more

Summary A production audit log failure occurred where Javers failed to record granular property changes for nested objects. Instead of capturing specific field updates (e.g., product.code), the system only reported a change in the identity (ID) of the referenced entity. This resulted in a complete loss of visibility into the actual state changes of downstream … Read more

Summary This postmortem investigates why SRP batching fails when a fragment shader performs alpha discard or clipping to create a cutout effect. The root cause is that batching requires a deterministic set of draw calls and a shared sub‑render instance; any per‑fragment discard invalidates this guarantee. The fix is to move the clipping logic to … Read more

Summary During the development of a real-time AI lecture-transcription platform, we encountered a significant cost-efficiency and data-integrity bottleneck. The system was transmitting continuous audio streams—including long periods of silence and ambient classroom noise—directly to the transcription and LLM pipeline. This resulted in inflated token consumption, unnecessary backend processing, and degraded summarization quality due to “hallucinated” … Read more