research-article

Efficient and deterministic record & replay for actor languages

Authors:

Dominik Aumayr,

Clément Béra,

Elisa Gonzalez Boix,

Hanspeter MössenböckAuthors Info & Claims

ManLang '18: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Managed Languages & Runtimes

Article No.: 15, Pages 1 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/3237009.3237015

Published: 12 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

With the ubiquity of parallel commodity hardware, developers turn to high-level concurrency models such as the actor model to lower the complexity of concurrent software. However, debugging concurrent software is hard, especially for concurrency models with a limited set of supporting tools. Such tools often deal only with the underlying threads and locks, which obscures the view on e.g. actors and messages and thereby introduces additional complexity.

To improve on this situation, we present a low-overhead record & replay approach for actor languages. It allows one to debug concurrency issues deterministically based on a previously recorded trace. Our evaluation shows that the average run-time overhead for tracing on benchmarks from the Savina suite is 10% (min. 0%, max. 20%). For Acme-Air, a modern web application, we see a maximum increase of 1% in latency for HTTP requests and about 1.4 MB/s of trace data. These results are a first step towards deterministic replay debugging of actor systems in production.

References

[1]

Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, Claes Wikstrom, and Mike Williams. 1996. Concurrent Programming in Erlang (2 ed.). Prentice Hall PTR.

Digital Library

[2]

Earl T Barr, Mark Marron, Ed Maurer, Dan Moseley, and Gaurav Seth. 2016. Time-travel debugging for JavaScript/Node.js. In Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2016). ACM, 1003--1007.

Digital Library

[3]

Edd Barrett, Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick, Rebecca Killick, Sarah Mount, and Laurence Tratt. 2017. Virtual Machine Warmup Blows Hot and Cold. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 1, OOPSLA, Article 52 (Oct. 2017), 27 pages.

Digital Library

[4]

Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Carlos Noguera, Tom Van Cutsem, Wolfgang De Meuter, and Theo D'Hondt. 2011. Reme-d: A reflective epidemic message-oriented debugger for ambient-oriented applications. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. ACM, 1275--1281.

Digital Library

[5]

Gilad Bracha, Peter von der Ahé, Vassili Bykov, Yaron Kashai, William Maddox, and Eliot Miranda. 2010. Modules as Objects in Newspeak. In ECOOP 2010 - Object-Oriented Programming, Theo D'Hondt (Ed.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 405--428.

Digital Library

[6]

Brian Burg, Richard Bailey, Andrew J. Ko, and Michael D. Ernst. 2013. Interactive Record/Replay for Web Application Debugging. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'13). ACM, 473--484.

Digital Library

[7]

Sergey Bykov, Alan Geller, Gabriel Kliot, James R. Larus, Ravi Pandya, and Jorgen Thelin. 2011. Orleans: Cloud Computing for Everyone. In Proceedings of the 2Nd ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 16, 14 pages.

Digital Library

[8]

Yunji Chen, Shijin Zhang, Qi Guo, Ling Li, Ruiyang Wu, and Tianshi Chen. 2015. Deterministic Replay: A Survey. ACM Comput. Surv. 48, 2, Article 17 (Sept. 2015), 47 pages.

Digital Library

[9]

Sylvan Clebsch, Sophia Drossopoulou, Sebastian Blessing, and Andy McNeil. 2015. Deny Capabilities for Safe, Fast Actors. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control (AGERE! 2015). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1--12.

Digital Library

[10]

Ronald Curtis and Larry D. Wittie. 1982. BUGNET: A debugging system for parallel programming environments. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'82). IEEE Computer Society, 394--400.

[11]

Joeri De Koster, Tom Van Cutsem, and Wolfgang De Meuter. 2016. 43 Years of Actors: A Taxonomy of Actor Models and Their Key Properties. In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control (AGERE 2016). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 31--40.

Digital Library

[12]

Tim Felgentreff, Michael Perscheid, and Robert Hirschfeld. 2017. Implementing record and refinement for debugging timing-dependent communication. Science of Computer Programming 134 (2017), 4--18.

Digital Library

[13]

Jim Gray. 1986. Why do computers stop and what can be done about it?. In Symposium on reliability in distributed software and database systems. Los Angeles, CA, USA, 3--12.

[14]

Emily H Halili. 2008. Apache JMeter: A practical beginner's guide to automated testing and performance measurement for your websites. Packt Publishing Ltd.

Digital Library

[15]

Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger. 1973. A Universal Modular ACTOR Formalism for Artificial Intelligence. In IJCAI'73: Proceedings of the 3rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann, 235--245.

Digital Library

[16]

Jeff Huang, Peng Liu, and Charles Zhang. 2010. LEAP: Lightweight Deterministic Multi-processor Replay of Concurrent Java Programs. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 207--216.

Digital Library

[17]

Shams M. Imam and Vivek Sarkar. 2014. Savina - An Actor Benchmark Suite: Enabling Empirical Evaluation of Actor Libraries. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors Agents & Decentralized Control (AGERE!'14). ACM, 67--80.

Digital Library

[18]

Jacques Chassin de Kergommeaux, Michiel Ronsse, and Koenraad De Bosschere. 1999. MPL*: Efficient Record/Play of Nondeterministic Features of Message Passing Libraries. In Proceedings of the 6th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting on Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface. Springer, London, UK, 141--148.

Digital Library

[19]

Ivan Lanese, Naoki Nishida, Adrián Palacios, and Germán Vidal. 2018. CauDEr: A Causal-Consistent Reversible Debugger for Erlang. In Functional and Logic Programming (FLOPS'18), Vol. 10818. Springer, 247--263.

[20]

Thomas J LeBlanc and John M Mellor-Crummey. 1987. Debugging parallel programs with instant replay. IEEE Trans. Comput. 4 (1987), 471--482.

Digital Library

[21]

Philipp Lengauer, Verena Bitto, and Hanspeter Mössenböck. 2015. Accurate and Efficient Object Tracing for Java Applications. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 51--62.

Digital Library

[22]

Hongyu Liu, Sam Silvestro, Wei Wang, Chen Tian, and Tongping Liu. 2018. iReplayer: In-situ and Identical Record-and-replay for Multithreaded Applications. In Proceedings of the 39th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2018). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 344--358.

Digital Library

[23]

Stefan Marr. 2018. ReBench: Execute and Document Benchmarks Reproducibly. (August 2018). Version 1.0.

[24]

Stefan Marr, Benoit Daloze, and Hanspeter Mössenböck. 2016. Cross-Language Compiler Benchmarking---Are We Fast Yet?. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Languages (DLS'16), Vol. 52. ACM, 120--131.

Digital Library

[25]

Stefan Marr, Carmen Torres Lopez, Dominik Aumayr, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, and Hanspeter Mössenböck. 2017. A Concurrency-Agnostic Protocol for Multi-Paradigm Concurrent Debugging Tools. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Languages (DLS'17). ACM.

Digital Library

[26]

Ali José Mashtizadeh, Tal Garfinkel, David Terei, David Mazieres, and Mendel Rosenblum. 2017. Towards Practical Default-On Multi-Core Record/Replay. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'17). ACM, 693--708.

Digital Library

[27]

Charles E. McDowell and David P. Helmbold. 1989. Debugging Concurrent Programs. ACM Comput. Surv. 21, 4 (Dec. 1989), 593--622.

Digital Library

[28]

Mark S. Miller, E. Dean Tribble, and Jonathan Shapiro. 2005. Concurrency Among Strangers: Programming in E As Plan Coordination. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Trustworthy Global Computing (TGC'05). Springer, 195--229.

Digital Library

[29]

Satish Narayanasamy, Gilles Pokam, and Brad Calder. 2005. BugNet: Continuously Recording Program Execution for Deterministic Replay Debugging. SIGARCH Comput. Archit. News 33, 2 (May 2005), 284--295.

Digital Library

[30]

Michael Perscheid, Benjamin Siegmund, Marcel Taeumel, and Robert Hirschfeld. 2016. Studying the advancement in debugging practice of professional software developers. Software Quality Journal 25, 1 (2016), 83--110. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/journals/sqj/sqj25.html#PerscheidSTH17

Digital Library

[31]

Michiel Ronsse, Koen De Bosschere, and Jacques Chassin de Kergommeaux. 2000. Execution replay and debugging. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Automated Debugging (AADebug).

[32]

M. A. Ronsse and D. A. Kranzlmuller. 1998. RoltMP-replay of Lamport timestamps for message passing systems. In Parallel and Distributed Processing, 1998. PDP '98. Proceedings of the Sixth Euromicro Workshop on. 87--93.

[33]

Andrea Rosà, Lydia Y. Chen, and Walter Binder. 2016. Actor Profiling in Virtual Execution Environments. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences (GPCE'16). ACM, 36--46.

Digital Library

[34]

Andrea Rosà, Lydia Y. Chen, and Walter Binder. 2016. Profiling Actor Utilization and Communication in Akka. In Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Erlang (Erlang 2016). ACM, 24--32.

Digital Library

[35]

Kazuhiro Shibanai and Takuo Watanabe. 2017. Actoverse: a reversible debugger for actors. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control. ACM, 50--57.

Digital Library

[36]

Benjamin H. Sigelman, Luiz André Barroso, Mike Burrows, Pat Stephenson, Manoj Plakal, Donald Beaver, Saul Jaspan, and Chandan Shanbhag. 2010. Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure. Technical report. Technical report, Google, Inc. https://research.google.com/archive/papers/dapper-2010-1.pdf

[37]

Terry Stanley, Tyler Close, and Mark S Miller. 2009. Causeway: A message-oriented distributed debugger. Technical Report of HP, HPL-2009-78 (2009).

[38]

Dave Thomas. 2014. Programming Elixir: Functional, Concurrent, Pragmatic, Fun (1st ed.). Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Digital Library

[39]

Stefan Tilkov and Steve Vinoski. 2010. Node.js: Using JavaScript to Build High-Performance Network Programs. IEEE Internet Computing 14, 6 (Nov 2010), 80--83.

Digital Library

[40]

Carmen Torres Lopez, Stefan Marr, Hanspeter Mössenböck, and Elisa Gonzalez Boix. 2016. Towards Advanced Debugging Support for Actor Languages: Studying Concurrency Bugs in Actor-based Programs. (30 Oct. 2016), 5 pages.

[41]

Takanori Ueda, Takuya Nakaike, and Moriyoshi Ohara. 2016. Workload Characterization for Microservices. In 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC'16). IEEE, 85--94.

[42]

Tom Van Cutsem. 2012. AmbientTalk: Modern Actors for Modern Networks. In Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs (FTfJP '12). ACM, 2--2.

Digital Library

[43]

Thomas Würthinger, Christian Wimmer, Christian Humer, Andreas Wöß, Lukas Stadler, Chris Seaton, Gilles Duboscq, Doug Simon, and Matthias Grimmer. 2017. Practical Partial Evaluation for High-performance Dynamic Language Runtimes. In Proceedings of the 38th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'17). ACM, 662--676.

Digital Library

[44]

Thomas Würthinger, Andreas Wöß, Lukas Stadler, Gilles Duboscq, Doug Simon, and Christian Wimmer. 2012. Self-Optimizing AST Interpreters. In Proceedings of the 8th Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS'12). 73--82.

Digital Library

Cited By

Schwartz DSridharan M(2024)JMVX: Improving Record-Replay for Managed LanguagesCompanion Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity10.1145/3689491.3691819(13-15)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689491.3691819
Lami PLanese IStefani JSacerdoti Coen CFabbretti G(2024)Reversible debugging of concurrent Erlang programs: Supporting imperative primitivesJournal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.100944(100944)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.100944
Babaei MBen-Attia M(2023)ra4xstate: An Efficient Quantitative Robustness Analysis Approach for Statecharts2023 IEEE/ACM 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Practices for the IoT (SERP4IoT)10.1109/SERP4IoT59158.2023.00013(46-53)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SERP4IoT59158.2023.00013
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Efficient and deterministic record & replay for actor languages
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Concurrent computing methodologies
    1. Concurrent programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

Recommendations

Debugging support for multi-paradigm concurrent programs
SPLASH Companion 2019: Proceedings Companion of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

With the widespread adoption of concurrent programming, debugging of non-deterministic failures becomes increasingly important. Record & replay debugging aids developers in this effort by reliably reproducing recorded bugs. Because each concurrency ...
Software-only system-level record and replay in wireless sensor networks
IPSN '15: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are plagued by the possibility of bugs manifesting only at deployment. However, debugging deployed WSNs is challenging for several reasons---the remote location of deployed sensor nodes, the non- determinism of execution ...
CARE: cache guided deterministic replay for concurrent Java programs
ICSE 2014: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

Deterministic replay tools help programmers debug concurrent programs. However, for long-running programs, a replay tool may generate huge log of shared memory access dependences. In this paper, we present CARE, an application-level deterministic ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

ManLang '18: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Managed Languages & Runtimes

September 2018

204 pages

ISBN:9781450364249

DOI:10.1145/3237009

Conference Chair:
Eli Tilevich
Virginia Tech
,
General Chair:
Hanspeter Mössenböck
Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 September 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Conference

ManLang'18

ManLang'18: 15th International Conference on Managed Languages & Runtimes

September 12 - 13, 2018

Linz, Austria

Acceptance Rates

ManLang '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 25 submissions, 48%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 12 of 25 submissions, 48%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

16
Total Citations
View Citations
156
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)13
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 16 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Schwartz DSridharan M(2024)JMVX: Improving Record-Replay for Managed LanguagesCompanion Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity10.1145/3689491.3691819(13-15)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689491.3691819
Lami PLanese IStefani JSacerdoti Coen CFabbretti G(2024)Reversible debugging of concurrent Erlang programs: Supporting imperative primitivesJournal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.100944(100944)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.100944
Babaei MBen-Attia M(2023)ra4xstate: An Efficient Quantitative Robustness Analysis Approach for Statecharts2023 IEEE/ACM 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Practices for the IoT (SERP4IoT)10.1109/SERP4IoT59158.2023.00013(46-53)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SERP4IoT59158.2023.00013
Distler TEischer MLawniczak L(2023)Micro Replication2023 53rd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)10.1109/DSN58367.2023.00024(123-137)Online publication date: Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN58367.2023.00024
Merino XOtero C(2023)Microservice Debugging with Checkpoint-Restart2023 IEEE Cloud Summit10.1109/CloudSummit57601.2023.00016(58-63)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CloudSummit57601.2023.00016
Babaei MDingel J(2023)Efficient regression testing of distributed real-time reactive systems in the context of model-driven developmentSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-023-01086-522:5(1565-1587)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-023-01086-5
Lauwaerts TCastillo CSingh RMarra MScholliers CGonzalez Boix E(2022)Event-Based Out-of-Place DebuggingProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3546918.3546920(85-97)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3546918.3546920
Kirchhof JMalcher LRumpe BTilevich EDe Roover C(2021)Understanding and improving model-driven IoT systems through accompanying digital twinsProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/3486609.3487210(197-209)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3486609.3487210
Babaei MDingel J(2021)Efficient Replay-based Regression Testing for Distributed Reactive Systems in the Context of Model-driven Development2021 ACM/IEEE 24th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS)10.1109/MODELS50736.2021.00018(89-100)Online publication date: Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/MODELS50736.2021.00018
Babaei MDingel J(2021)MRegTest: A Replay-Based Regression Testing Tool for Distributed UML-RT Models2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C)10.1109/MODELS-C53483.2021.00095(620-624)Online publication date: Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/MODELS-C53483.2021.00095
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents