A Transparent Monitor Based on JDI for Scalable Race Detection of Concurrent Java Programs

Abstract

Race conditions in current Java programs must be detected because it may cause unexpected result by non-deterministic executions.For detecting such races during program execution, execution flows of all threads and all access events can be monitored. It is difficult for previous race detection techniques to monitor all threads and access events in actuality because these techniques analyze the files traced during program execution or modify original source programs and then monitor these programs. This paper presents a transparent scalable monitoring tool to detect races using JDI(Java Debug Interface) where JDI is 100% pure java interface to provide in JDPA(Java Platform Debugger Architecture) and is able to provide information corresponding to events occurred in run-time of programs. This tool thus can monitor execution flows of all threads and all access events without program modification. We prove transparency of the presented tool and grasp the efficiency of it using a set of published benchmark programs. As a result of this, the suggested tool can monitor all threads and accesses of these programs without their modification, and their monitoring time is increased to more than 20 times.