LLM Diagnosed Hidden .NET ArrayPool Lock Causing 20% CPU Spike in Minutes
A market-data gateway service experienced an unexplained 20% CPU increase after a broadcast fan-out feature was added, with no obvious synchronization code in the codebase. Using a diagnostics tool called dotnet-diagnostics-mcp, an LLM-assisted investigation traced 15.8% of all CPU samples to Monitor.Enter_Slowpath, a hidden lock contention path. The culprit turned out to be ArrayPool.Shared, a standard .NET buffer-pooling mechanism that uses internal locking under high concurrent access. The refactor that introduced the issue had been reviewed and merged precisely because it replaced custom code with a well-regarded, optimized library, making it invisible to static analysis tools. The case highlights how AI-assisted runtime diagnostics can surface performance regressions that conventional code review and static analysis are structurally unable to detect.
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