RReplay: A Record and Replay System Based on Restricted Multi-threading

This paper presents RReplay: a novel record & replay system for multi-threaded programs to solve their debugging problems caused by non-deterministic thread interleavings. The idea of RReplay is to only record the key non-deterministic behaviors that mostly affect performance. Different from existing approaches, RReplay requires that the programs be executed in a restricted environment so that the freedom of non-determinism is controlled and limited. By doing so, most non-deterministic thread interleavings are eliminated. This simplifies the complexity of traditional record & replay systems as well as improves performance. As the non-deterministic behaviors are much less in the restricted environment, the size of recorded logs is also greatly reduced. We design the Restriction Execution Runtime (RER) to restrict the freedom of non-deterministic thread interleavings. Our Recorder and Replayer are built upon RER, which provides the non-deterministic events for the Recorder and accepts the deterministic control from the Replayer. We build a simulator to evaluate RReplay. The results show that RReplay only incurs 38.6% recording overhead and it produces logs at speed of 23.4KB/s.