Background

Wrote an article last year, which explained how to use the symbolicatecrash tool to symbolicate crash information.

At that time, based on this method, implemented a small system for automatically symbolizing crash information for the company’s product.

After App gets crash information, packages and uploads to company’s crash collection server.
Python script periodically gets crashes, and finds corresponding version’s symbol files on internal Jenkins server.
Finally after symbolization, aggregates into database.
Web for convenient querying, aggregated by module, version, stack, etc. Convenient for finding crash causes and tracking crash trends.

Problem

However, there’s always been a problem. symbolicatecrash when analyzing certain crashes (about 1/3 of total crashes) will have CPU 100%, and never finish situation. (Never finish is a guess, because ran several times overnight, finally had to kill the process). symbolicatecrash is a Perl script, perl process CPU usage stays at 100%.

Guessed it should be this perl script’s problem, but searched everywhere and couldn’t find results.

Temporary workaround: If crash analysis exceeds 15s, kill this analysis process. Hence this blog

However, this solution causes only about 2/3 of crashes to be analyzed. Problem is serious, but endured it.

Solution

Half a year passed, thought to try solving it again.

Colleague found an article, excitedly tried it immediately. (Article was written in late September, probably right when I gave up searching…)

This is because xcode’s provided symbolicatecrash will deadloop on logs with duplicate images.

Modify symbolicatecrash File

Xcode 7.2 and earlier: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/DTDeviceKitBase.framework/Versions/A/Resources/symbolicatecrash

Xcode 7.3 /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/DVTFoundation.framework/Versions/A/Resources/symbolicatecrash

Reference: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/43489

Replace the following code:

                # add ourselves to that chain
                $images{$nextIDKey}{nextID} = $image{base};

                # and store under the key we just recorded
                $bundlename = $bundlename . $image{base};

With:

            if ($image{uuid} ne $images{$bundlename}{uuid}) {

                # add ourselves to that chain
                $images{$nextIDKey}{nextID} = $image{base};

                # and store under the key we just recorded
                $bundlename = $bundlename . $image{base};

And it’s solved. Don’t know why Apple doesn’t fix this issue.

Summary

Need the spirit to research thoroughly.