Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has successfully reduced the crash rate on iOS by 50% after identifying the long-term bugs, which were the root-cause. The social networking site is focussing on the mobile platform more than ever as half of its total traffic comes from it. The company wants to ensure that the main app is not bugged like before for its users. The New York-based team of mobile engineers successfully tracked the bug, which helped in fixing the issue to a great extent.
Debugging greatest concern for Facebook
The fix has come at a time when Facebook is directing users to download a separate Facebook messenger app that cuts the facility of sending messages to friends and family through the current app.
Facebook stated in a blog post that the greatest concern faced in the mobile apps is debugging. The company has been receiving the notification about the app crash in its report analyzer, but it took months before the company could identify the issue and resolve it.
Nicolas Spiegelberg, engineering manager at Facebook Inc’s New York office, told Mashable, “When looking at the root cause of this iOS crash, at a fundamental level, you can think of it like people collaboratively editing a word document.” Spiegelberg added that when three people edit the document then it becomes simpler to identify the source, but when there are 200 collaborators it is challenging to identify where the changes are made.
Bug was fixed within hours
In iOS crash case, there were two systems involved each one writing the code out of which one was an expired number that was similar to the new system’s location number. Spiegelberg said that Facebook is using the APIs developed back in 70s, which suggests that there are no checks to verify that their code owns this number, which allowed this bug to remain unchecked.
Facebook engineer said that usually it is easy to access the problem with a small program, but there are various layers of code and hundreds of system interacting, and that is why searching through the interacting systems need specific diagnosis and its own code to algorithmically search through. After locating at the problem, the company was able to identify the exact issue and resolve it within few hours. Finally, Facebook users will not suffer the crash as frequently as before.
