How to determine what is causing NCrunch to die?

we have some tests that have started failing randomly on the grid nodes (and occasionally locally) with this:

NCrunch was unable to retrieve a meaningful result from this test

looking around it seems that something is happening to cause the NCRunch process to die, and indeed locally when it happens I get a popup box that says the process has died.

Unfortunately its not always the same tests every time and is seemingly random.

I noticed that you had previously advised someone that sent in a sample solution of the error, so I was wondering waht the best course of action for diagnosing this is?

Hi, thanks for sharing this issue.

There's a broad range of things that can cause this error, for example:

- OutOfMemoryExceptions at run time
- StackOverflowExceptions in referenced code
- Unmanaged exceptions
- Accidental termination (i.e. Process.Kill)
- Hardware or platform instability
- NCrunch internal problem (rare these days, especially when working on proven frameworks and toolsets)

The hard part here is finding the source of the problem. Since the issue results in immediate termination of the process, there's no progress or error information to be retrieved.

Does your event viewer show you any information?

It might be possible to reproduce the issue with some consistency using Churn Mode. This may help with narrowing it down. If you can get one test that you know kicks the issue up, try running it under Churn Mode for an indefinite period of time to see if you can make it fail.

it was indeed a StackOverflowException and it happened under some circumstances in the running of the app, which lead us to identifying it, and this fixed the tests

Thanks for the help