stabilizing skype with gdb
We all know that Skype is a terrible piece of software, with the Linux version buggy and left behind the main code base, but lately it's been crashing like a Top Gear funny men in an overpowered car. Each time it starts and there are chat windows with new messages to be shown, the damn thing segfaults (at least on 64 bit, statically linked against Qt). While trying to find more details about the problem, I stumbled upon an unlikely fix: running skype under gdb seems to stabilize it. Is it the delay introduced by the debugger interfering with some concurrency bugs or some other mechanism at work? No idea. Just that this is how I run the rubbish right now:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/skype" gdb /opt/skype/skype
and then type 'r' in the debugger. It hasn't crashed once under gdb so there's no stack trace available.
Category: Linux
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