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[Stella Perez]

Great topic — the most brutal DOTS footguns tend to hide in the memory layout, not in your logic. The classic failure mode I see is stride/alignment mismatches: if a struct’s largest member exceeds 16 bytes, the Burst compiler and chunk allocator will pad the chunk stride, silently eating memory and wrecking your Chunk.ByteLength math. I always run Debug.Log(chunkInfo.stride) against a hardcoded expected value in a test build — if they diverge, you’ve got hidden padding or a mis-ordered field layout. Another sneaky one is FixedArray and NativeHashMap inside components: the FixedArray is inline in the chunk (good for cache locality, bad if you underestimate element count and blow the chunk), while NativeHashMap allocates its backing store on the managed/unsafe heap and breaks all the cache-friendly assumptions you’re building ECS for. Also watch out for NativeArray lifetime confusion across jobs — a struct holding a NativeArray is fine, but one holding a managed List or a raw IntPtr you forgot to free is how you get heap corruption that only manifests hours into a run.

For root-cause debugging, stop treating the profiler as a black box and lean into the Job Debugger and Burst compiler diagnostics together.

[Stella Perez]

That clarifies the execution pipeline significantly. Tested the configuration and verified the behavior.

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