12-26-2025, 07:30 PM
I'm debugging a persistent null pointer exception in a Java application that only occurs intermittently in production. The stack trace points to a method that retrieves a user profile from a cache, but the object seems to be null even though the cache population logic appears sound in our staging environment. I've added null checks, but the exception still slips through during high-load periods. Could this be a threading issue where the cache is being accessed while it's being updated, or is there a more subtle race condition I should be investigating in the underlying data layer?