Pip: Detecting the Unexpected in Distributed Systems

Bugs in distributed systems are often hard to find. Many bugs reflect discrepancies between a system’s behavior and the programmer’s assumptions about that behavior. We present Pip1, an infrastructure for comparing actual behavior and expected behavior to expose structural errors and performance problems in distributed systems. Pip allows programmers to express, in a declarative language, expectations about the system’s communications structure, timing, and resource consumption. Pip includes system instrumentation and annotation tools to log actual system behavior, and visualization and query tools for exploring expected and unexpected behavior2. Pip allows a developer to quickly understand and debug both familiar and unfamiliar systems. We applied Pip to several applications, including FAB, SplitStream, Bullet, and RanSub. We generated most of the instrumentation for all four applications automatically. We found the needed expectations easy to write, starting in each case with automatically generated expectations. Pip found unexpected behavior in each application, and helped to isolate the causes of poor performance and incorrect behavior.