PROGRAM EXECUTION STACK SIGNATURES

A digital computer call stack or combined call stack and data stack is traced and analyzed following the occurrence of an unhandled exception or crash. Stack frame sizes and other artifacts are used to form a distinctive stack signature that generally reflects execution of the program up to the point of failure, without being finely detailed. Stack signatures can be associated with program bugs, and stack signatures collected from other failure instances, at other times or on other machines, can be conveniently compared for recognizing particular types of failures, without access to source code and without detailed study of memory dumps.