Framework-aware debugging with stack tailoring

Abstract

Debugging applications that execute within a framework is not always easy: the call-stack offered to developers is often a mix-up of stack frames that belong to different frameworks, introducing an unnecessary noise that prevents developers from focusing on the debugging task. Moreover, relevant application code is not always available in the call-stack because it may have already returned, or is available in another thread. In such cases, manually gathering all relevant information from these different sources is not only cumbersome but also costly.In this paper we introduce Sarto, a call-stack instrumentation layer that allows developers to tailor the stack to make debugging framework-aware. The goal is to improve the quality and amount information present in the call-stack to reduce debugging time without impacting the execution time. Sarto proposes a set of six stack operations that combined hide irrelevant information, introduce missing information, and relate dispersed debugging sources before this is fed to the debugger.We validate Sarto by applying it to four application cases using inherently different frameworks: unit testing, web server, remote promises and big data processing. We showcase our experiences in using Sarto in the different frameworks, and perform some performance benchmarks to demonstrate that Sarto does not generate noticeable overhead when instrumenting a call-stack. We also show that our solution reduces by half the amount of data stored to debug similar exceptions happening in a parallel setup.CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Application specific development environments; Integrated and visual development environments; Error handling and recovery; Software testing and debugging.

Practical Online Debugging of Spark-like Applications

“…In order for composite exception to work with DDDs we employ delta stacks [13]: we extract the execution stacks of two similar exceptions and for each pair of stack frames, we compute their differences. We then serialize only one of the stacks of the two exceptions (previously shrunk with partition windowing), and for the other one only the differences.…”