SYNCTRACE: Visual thread-interplay analysis

Abstract

In software comprehension, program traces are important to gain insight into certain aspects of concurrent runtime behavior, e.g., thread-interplay. Here, key tasks are finding usages of blocking operations, such as synchronization and I/O operations, assessing temporal order of such operations, and analyzing their effects. This is a hard task for large and complex program traces due to their size and number of threads involved. In this paper, we present SYNCTRACE a new visualization technique based on (bended) activity diagrams and edge bundles that allows for parallel analysis of multiple threads and their inter-thread correspondences. We demonstrate how the technique, implemented as a tool, can be applied on real-world trace datasets to support understanding concurrent behavior.