678865 - Proposal: Replace (Empty Signature) with useful strings

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Socorro :: General, task)

Description

[[:jberkus] Josh Berkus]

Currently we store the following in reports.signature:

NULL == stackwalker crashed while trying to find signature
'' == stackwalker could not determine the crashing thread

Both appear in the UI as (Empty Signature) which is uninformative.  Also, using the values '' and NULL result in a number of persistent and hard-to-resolve bugs in the UI and matviews.

I suggest that we should replace these two with more useful strings which indicate what data we actually have, namely:

"EMPTY SIGNATURE: MDSW FAILED"
and
"EMPTY SIGNATURE: MDSW CRASHING THREAD INDETERMINATE"

These strings would both be more informative, and would eliminate a host of persistent query problems.  It could be easily backfilled in Postgres back to 4/17.

It is unclear on whether we should backfill any data to clean the above up in Hbase and ES.

Comment 1

[Robert Kaiser]

(In reply to Josh Berkus from comment #0)
> "EMPTY SIGNATURE: MDSW FAILED"
> and
> "EMPTY SIGNATURE: MDSW CRASHING THREAD INDETERMINATE"

Those are still UI-unfriendly but maybe we can find something nice to show there.

Comment 2

[[:jberkus] Josh Berkus]

KaiRo,

Any string you want to use is OK with me, as long as it's not '' or NULL.  It's those which we have to write a lot of code to work around.

Comment 3

[K Lars Lohn [:lars] [:klohn]]

I need more information.  Precisely what do you want the "empty" and "null" signatures to be?

Comment 4

[Robert Kaiser]

(In reply to K Lars Lohn [:lars] [:klohn] from comment #3)
> I need more information.  Precisely what do you want the "empty" and "null"
> signatures to be?

As long as they are understandable and different cases can be told apart, I don't care too much what exactly they are.

Possible examples:

EMPTY: zero-size minidump
EMPTY: stackwalking failed
EMPTY: no crashing thread determined

Comment 5

[K Lars Lohn [:lars] [:klohn]]

This change awaits deployment to staging and the push to production.

I used these empty signature replacements:

EMPTY: no crashing thread identified
EMPTY: no frame data available

in either case, if the stackwalker fails, "; corrupt dump" is appended, too.

Comment 6

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to https://github.com/mozilla/socorro

https://github.com/mozilla/socorro/commit/3ef41152d4146ca006e98c65608290cf4318f338
Merge pull request #111 from twobraids/Bug678865

Bug 678865 - eliminate empty signature

Comment 7

[[:jberkus] Josh Berkus]

On IRC, Kairo decided that we should not attempt to backfill empty strings.