SP8D Troubleshooting Guide

Troubleshooting Scenarios

Persistent Buffer Full

• Check if your consumer is too slow or your buffer is too small.
• Use diagnostics to identify bottlenecks.
• Try increasing buffer size or optimizing consumer logic.

Starvation or Unfair Access

• Use diagnostics to check for agents that are not making progress.
• Review your concurrency pattern—consider switching to SPSC or MPSC if possible.
• Tune buffer size and retry logic.

Slot State Machine Issues

For a complete guide to slot state machine internals—including slot lifecycle, state transitions, fairness, and recovery—see the Slot State Machine documentation.

Advanced Diagnostics & Mythbusting

• Myth: “Backpressure means data loss.”
  Fact: SP8D never drops data silently; you always get a signal and can handle it.
• Myth: “Fairness is automatic in all lock-free systems.”
  Fact: Only protocols with explicit fairness mechanisms (like SP8D’s slot state machine) can guarantee it.
• Myth: “Backpressure only happens in slow systems.”
  Fact: Backpressure can occur even in high-performance systems during bursts or imbalanced workloads.
• Myth: “Diagnostics are only for debugging.”
  Fact: Diagnostics are essential for proactive monitoring and tuning in production.

Where to Go Next

• Common Recipes
• Channel API Reference
• Protocol Architecture Overview
• Fairness & Backpressure
• FAQ & Troubleshooting