Major Description
To append to a data file, we first open the file as RandomAccessFile in read-write mode, read some information such sync, seek to the end of the file and then use its FileDescriptor to create a FileOutputStream. Sharing a FileDescriptor this way could lead to problem if one of its containers is garbage-collected while the other is still in use. Please see: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6322678. The bug got fixed in Java 7 (b06). In our case, RandomAccessFile sometimes gets garbage-collected leading to write errors. If the Java unit-tests are run multiple times, this occurs about 25% of the time on my Windows machine and about 50% on my Ubuntu Linux box.