Implementing record and refinement for debugging timing-dependent communication

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• 作者：T. Felgentreff ; ^{tim.felgentreff@hpi.uni-potsdam.de} ; M. Perscheid ^{michael.perscheid@hpi.uni-potsdam.de} ; R. Hirschfeld ^{robert.hirschfeld@hpi.uni-potsdam.de}
• 关键词：Distributed debugging ; Record and replay ; Dynamic analysis ; Record and refinement
• 刊名：Science of Computer Programming
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：1 February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：134
• 期：Complete
• 页码：4-18
• 全文大小：2181 K
• 卷排序：134

文摘

Distributed applications are hard to debug because timing-dependent network communication is a source of non-deterministic behavior. Current approaches to debug non-deterministic failures include post-mortem debugging as well as record and replay. However, the first impairs system performance to gather data, whereas the latter requires developers to understand the timing-dependent communication at a lower level of abstraction than they develop at. Furthermore, both approaches require intrusive core library modifications to gather data from live systems.In this paper, we present the Peek-At-Talk debugger for investigating non-deterministic failures with low overhead in a systematic, top-down method, with a particular focus on tool-building issues in the following areas: First, we show how our debugging framework Path Tools guides developers from failures to their root causes and gathers run-time data with low overhead. Second, we present Peek-At-Talk, an extension to our Path Tools framework to record non-deterministic communication and refine behavioral data that connects source code with network events. Finally, we scope changes to the core library to record network communication without impacting other network applications.