Causeway: a message-oriented distributed debugger
Venue
HP Labs (2009)
Publication Year
2009
Authors
Terry Stanley, Tyler Close, Mark S. Miller
BibTeX
Abstract
An increasing number of developers face the difficult task of debugging distributed
asynchronous programs. This trend has outpaced the development of adequate
debugging tools and currently, the best option for many is an ad hoc patchwork of
sequential tools and printf debugging. This paper presents Causeway, a postmortem
distributed debugger that demonstrates a novel approach to understanding the
behavior of a distributed program. Our message-oriented approach borrows an
effective strategy from sequential debugging: To find the source of unintended
side- effects, start with the chain of expressed intentions. We show how Causeway's
integrated views - describing both distributed and sequential computation - help
users navigate causal pathways as they pursue suspicions. We highlight Causeway's
innovative features which include adaptive, customizable event abstraction
mechanisms and graphical views that follow message flow across process and machine
boundaries.
