Deterministic replay of Java multithreaded applications

Abstract

Threads and concurrency constructs in Java introduce non-determinism to a program's execution, which makes it hard to understand and analyze the execution behavior. Non-determinism in execution behavior also makes it impossible to use execution replay for debugging, performance monitoring, or visualization. This paper discusses a record/ replay tool for Java, DejaVu, that provides deterministic replay of a program's execution. In particular, this paper describes the idea of the logical thread schedule, which makes DejaVu efficient and independent of the underlying thread scheduler. The paper also discusses how to handle the various Java synchronization operations for record and replay. DejaVu has been implemented by modifying the Sun Microsystems' Java Virtual Machine.