Dynamic slicing long running programs through execution fast forwarding

14 years 5 months ago

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Fixing runtime bugs in long running programs using trace based analyses such as dynamic slicing was believed to be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we present a novel execution fast forwarding technique that makes this feasible. While a naive solution is to divide the entire execution by checkpoints, and then apply dynamic slicing enabled by tracing to one checkpoint interval at a time, it is still too costly even with state-of-the-art tracing techniques. Our technique is derived from two key observations. The first one is that long running programs are usually driven by events, which has been taken advantage of by checkpointing/replaying techniques to deterministically replay an execution from the event log. The second observation is that all the events are not relevant to replaying a particular part of the execution, in which the programmer suspects an error happened. We develop a slicing-like technique that can be used to prune irrelevant events from the event log. Driven by...

Xiangyu Zhang, Sriraman Tallam, Rajiv Gupta

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