A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs

The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thereby, they avoid concurrency bugs such as data races, but are not immune to concurrency bugs in general. This study taxonomizes concurrency bugs in actor-based programs reported in literature. Furthermore, it analyzes the bugs to identify the patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on this taxonomy, we further analyze the literature and find that current approaches to static analysis and testing focus on communication deadlocks and message protocol violations. However, they do not provide solutions to identify livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. The insights obtained in this study can be used to improve debugging support for actor-based programs with new debugging techniques to identify the root cause of complex concurrency bugs.Comment: - Submitted for review - Removed section 6 "Research Roadmap for Debuggers", its content was summarized in the Future Work section - Added references for section 1, section 3, section 4.3 and section 5.1 - Updated citation

An efficient deadlock prevention approach for service oriented transaction processing

Transaction processing can guarantee the reliability of business applications. Locking resources is widely used in distributed transaction management (e.g., two phase commit, 2PC) to keep the system consistent. The locking mechanism, however, potentially results in various deadlocks. In service oriented architecture (SOA), the deadlock problem becomes even worse because multiple (sub)transactions try to lock shared resources in the unexpectable way due to the more randomicity of transaction requests, which has not been solved by existing research results. In this paper, we investigate how to prevent local deadlocks, caused by the resource competition among multiple sub-transactions of a global transaction, and global deadlocks from the competition among different global transactions. We propose a replication based approach to avoid the local deadlocks, and a timestamp based approach to significantly mitigate the global deadlocks. A general algorithm is designed for both local and global deadlock prevention. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our deadlock prevention approach. Further, it is also proved that our approach provides higher system performance than traditional resource allocation schemes. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Design of deadlock detection and prevention algorithms in distributed systems

A distributed system consists of a collection of processes which communicate with each other by exchanging messages to achieve a common goal. One of the key problems in distributed systems is the possibility of deadlock. Processes are said to be deadlocked when some processes are blocked on resource requests that can never be satisfied unless drastic systems action is taken. Two distributed deadlock detection algorithms handling multiple outstanding requests is proposed and are proven to be correct: it detects all cycles and does not detect false deadlocks. The algorithms are based on the concept of chasing the edge of the waitfor graph (probe-based). Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs very well compared to some existing algorithms. A deadlock prevention algorithm based on the notion of coloring the nodes of the waitfor graph is also proposed. Rollback is quite less compared to some existing algorithms

Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases

Many popular database management systems implement a multiversion concurrency control algorithm called snapshot isolation rather than providing full serializability based on locking. There are well-known anomalies permitted by snapshot isolation that can lead to violations of data consistency by interleaving transactions that would maintain consistency if run serially. Until now, the only way to prevent these anomalies was to modify the applications by introducing explicit locking or artificial update conflicts, following careful analysis of conflicts between all pairs of transactions. This thesis describes a modification to the concurrency control algorithm of a database management system that automatically detects and prevents snapshot isolation anomalies at runtime for arbitrary applications, thus providing serializable isolation. The new algorithm preserves the properties that make snapshot isolation attractive, including that readers do not block writers and vice versa. An implementation of the algorithm in a relational database management system is described, along with a benchmark and performance study, showing that the throughput approaches that of snapshot isolation in most cases

CSP design model and tool support

The CSP paradigm is known as a powerful concept for designing and analysing the architectural and behavioural parts of concurrent software. Although the theory of CSP is useful for mathematicians, the programming language occam has been derived from CSP that is useful for any engineering practice. Nowadays, the concept of occam/CSP can be used for almost every object-oriented programming language. This paper describes a tree-based description model and prototype tool that elevates the use of occam/CSP concepts at the design level and performs code generation to Java, C, C++, and machine-readable CSP for the level of implementation. The tree-based description model can be used to browse through the generated source code. The tool is a kind of browser that is able to assist modern workbenches (like Borland Builder, Microsoft Visual C++ and 20-SIM) with coding concurrency. The tool will guide the user through the design trajectory using support messages and several semantic and syntax rule checks. The machine-readable CSP can be read by FDR, enabling more advanced analysis on the design. Early experiments with the prototype tool show that the browser concept, combined with the tree-based description model, enables a user-friendly way to create a design using the CSP concepts and benefits. The design tool is available from our URL, http://www.rt.el.utwente.nl/javapp