Skip to main content

Debug a Hang


A distributed hang is almost always one rank waiting for a call the others already made.


Key Insight​

Every rank in a distributed job must take part in each collective operation; if one rank skips it, the others wait forever and the job hangs. Setting TORCH_NCCL_BLOCKING_WAIT=1 and NCCL_DEBUG=INFO makes NCCL report which collective is stuck and on which rank.

Why This Matters​

Hangs are the most common and most confusing distributed failure. Learning to read these signals turns a silent freeze into a quick, fixable mismatch.