UC Irvine

Debugging distributed systems is difficult. Most of the techniques that have been developed for debugging such systems use either model checking, or postmortem analysis of logs and traces. Interactive debugging is a widely-used technique for debugging single threaded applications. But only a few interactive debuggers for distributed systems are available as the techniques used for building traditional debuggers for sequential single-threaded programs cannot be easily transferred to a distributed setting. In this thesis, I look at the topic of designing interactive debuggers for distributed systems and introduce GoTcha which is an interactive debugging tool for distributed systems based on the GoT distributed programming model. GoTcha supports the core features of traditional single-threaded debuggers like step-through debugging and breakpoints so that users can wield these powerful tools in a distributed context. I demonstrate the capabilities of GoTcha through a series of usage examples, and discuss the design and architecture of GoTcha.