Experiences with building distributed debuggers

Abstract

In this paper, we report on our experiences in building debuggers for distributed applications. We begin by presenting a number of important issues that are encountered in building distributed debuggers and briefly describe our approach to addressing them. Next, we outline a set of debugging functions that our debugger supports. We then describe the architecture of our latest prototype. The prototype supports the debugging of multi-threaded, multi-process, multi-language applications that use multiple middlewares while executing in a heterogeneous distributed environment. Finally, we describe the implementation of some of the distributed primitives that make our debugger particularly suited to debugging distributed applications.