Near-Omniscient Debugging for Java Using Size-Limited Execution Trace

Logging is an important feature for a software system to record its run-time information. Detailed logging allows developers to collect information in situations where they cannot use an interactive debugger, such as continuous integration and web application server cases. However, extensive logging leads to larger execution traces because few instructions could be repeated many times. To record detailed program behavior within limited storage space constraints, we propose Near-Omniscient Debugging, a methodology that records an execution trace using fixed size buffers for each observed instruction. Our tool monitors a Java program's execution and annotates source code with observed values in an HTML format. Developers can easily investigate the execution and share the report on a web server. In case of DaCapo benchmark applications, our tool requires fewer than 1% of the complete execution traces to visualize all runtime values used by 66% of instructions that are executed less than 64 times. Developers also can obtain data dependencies with precision 91.8% and recall 79.0% using this tool.