Alright, let me tell you about this thing I was wrestling with, this whole “700 4” situation. It sounds kinda cryptic, I know, but it basically boiled down to this task I had.
I needed to run this simulation, this process, a total of 700 times. The goal was to gather a bunch of data, see how things performed under repetition. Seemed straightforward enough when I started. Just set up a loop, let it run, grab a coffee, right? Well, not quite.
So, I got the initial script working. Ran it once, twice, three times – perfect. Looked good. Then, I set the counter to 700 and kicked it off. And that’s where the ‘4’ came crashing in. The damn thing would run exactly four times and then just… stop. Freeze up. Sometimes it’d throw a weird, unhelpful error, sometimes it would just hang there, mocking me.
First thought, okay, maybe it’s a resource thing. Memory leak? CPU overload? I fired up all the monitoring tools. Watched the graphs like a hawk while it ran those first few loops. Everything looked normal, nothing spiking, plenty of memory left. It wasn’t gasping for air, it just decided ‘nah, four’s enough for today’.
So, I started digging into the code itself. Maybe something specific happens on the fourth iteration? I added logging everywhere. Print statements after almost every line, trying to see exactly where it croaked. Ran it again. Loop 1… fine. Loop 2… fine. Loop 3… fine. Loop 4… starts okay, gets halfway through… silence. Nothing. The logs just stopped dead.
Spent basically a whole afternoon on this. Tried breaking the 700 down into smaller chunks. Tried running 10 loops – failed on number 4. Tried running just 5 loops – failed on number 4. It was always the fourth one. It became this weird obsession, figuring out the mystery of the fourth loop.
I fiddled with timing, added delays between loops thinking maybe it was some weird race condition or something needed to reset. Nope. Still died on the fourth run. I even started commenting out chunks of code within the loop, trying to isolate the problem area. It got simpler and simpler, but still, that fourth loop curse held strong.
Eventually, I found it. Deep down in some library call I was using, there was this undocumented, internal counter or state that wasn’t getting reset properly after the third call within the same session. It wasn’t my code directly, but this hidden thing inside a black box I was relying on. After the third successful run, it basically locked itself up on the fourth attempt.
The fix? Pretty anticlimactic, really. I had to basically tear down and re-initialize the whole library object inside the loop, before every single run. Gross, inefficient, felt totally wrong. But guess what? It worked. It finally chugged past iteration 4, then 5, then 10, and eventually all 700.
So yeah, “700 4”. Started as a target, ended up being the roadblock. It’s funny how sometimes the simplest sounding tasks end up sending you down these weird rabbit holes because of some obscure detail someone forgot to mention in the docs. Just another day, I guess. You fix it, you learn something weird, you move on.
