A trace simplification technique for effective debugging of concurrent programs

Concurrent programs are notoriously difficult to debug. We see two main reasons for this: 1) concurrency bugs are often difficult to reproduce, 2) traces of buggy concurrent executions can be complicated by fine-grained thread interleavings. Recently, a number of efficient techniques have tried to address the former reproducibility problem; however, there is no effective solution for the latter trace simplification problem. In this paper, we formalize and prove the trace simplification problem is NP-hard. We then propose a heuristic algorithm, Tinertia, that transforms a buggy execution trace into an easier-to-understand simplified trace. Tinertia works by automatically and iteratively increasing the granularity of the thread interleavings in the buggy trace. Tinertia cannot guarantee optimal simplification; however, we empirically show that our algorithm often generates optimally simplified traces. Moreover, we show that in the simplified trace, the locations of preemptive context sw...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Nicholas Jalbert, Koushik Sen
• Keywords: SIGSOFT 2010, Simplified Trace, Software Engineering, Thread Interleavings, Trace Simplification Problem