Efficient checkpointing of java software using context-sensitive capture and replay

Checkpointing and replaying is an attractive technique that has been used widely at the operating/runtime system level to provide fault tolerance. Applying such a technique at the application level can benefit a range of software engineering tasks such as testing of long-running programs, automated debugging, and dynamic slicing. We propose a checkpointing/replaying technique for Java that operates purely at the language level, without the need for JVM-level or OS-level support. At the core of our approach are static analyses that select, at certain program points, a safe subset of the program state to capture and replay. Irrelevant statements before the checkpoint are eliminated using control-dependencebased slicing; the remaining statements together with the captured run-time values are used to indirectly recreate the call stack of the original program at the checkpoint. At the checkpoint itself and at certain subsequent program points, the replaying version restores parts of the pr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Guoqing Xu, Atanas Rountev, Yan Tang, Feng Qin
• Keywords: Certain Subsequent Program, Low Run-time Overhead, Program State, SIGSOFT 2007, Software Engineering