Day 18: Stress Testing, a Big Win, and a Serious Bug

Last night I performed some stress testing on my poker app. Although it passed the stress testing, in the process I discovered an important bug.

First the intentional stress testing. While my app was running, I played Full Tilt Poker on three tables simultaneously. Therefore my app had three tables to monitor. I also had Mac OS X’s Activity Monitor running to see the load my poker analysis app puts on the computer. The results were excellent. Once the initial hand history loading is over, my app causes barely any CPU usage. Activity Monitor itself was using more CPU. So it seems my strategy of regularly polling for updated hand history files is fine.

Now the accidental bug discovery. I had a very good hand of poker, where I won $11. I play only very low stake games (in this case $0.05/$0.10 Pot Limit Hold’em), so this is the best win I’ve ever had.

I expected to see a enormous uptick in my real-time results graph. Unfortunately the opposite happened. The graph actually swung sharply downwards! A bit of investigation revealed that under some conditions, I was incorrectly calculating the result.