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Happens before-based dynamic analysis is the go-to technique for detecting data races in large scale software projects due to the absence of false positive reports. However, such analyses are expensive since they employ expensive vector clock updates at each event, rendering them usable only for in-house testing. In this paper, we present a sampling-based, randomized race detector that processes onlyconstantly manyevents of the input trace even in the worst case. This is the firstsub-lineartime (i.e., running ino(n) time wherenis the length of the trace) dynamic race detection algorithm; previous sampling based approaches like run in linear time (i.e.,O(n)). Our algorithm is a property tester for -race detection — it is sound in that it never reports any false positive, and on traces that are far, with respect to hamming distance, from any race-free trace, the algorithm detects an -race with high probability. Our experimental evaluation of the algorithm and its comparison with state-of-the-art deterministic and sampling based race detectors shows that the algorithm does indeed have significantly low running time, and detects races quite often.
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This content will become publicly available on June 10, 2026
Efficient Timestamping for Sampling-Based Race Detection
Dynamic race detection based on the happens before (HB) partial order has now become the de facto approach to quickly identify data races in multi-threaded software. Most practical implementations for detecting these races use timestamps to infer causality between events and detect races based on these timestamps. Such an algorithm updates timestamps (stored in vector clocks) at every event in the execution, and is known to induce excessive overhead. Random sampling has emerged as a promising algorithmic paradigm to offset this overhead. It offers the promise of making sound race detection scalable. In this work we consider the task of designing an efficient sampling based race detector with low overhead for timestamping when the number of sampled events is much smaller than the total events in an execution. To solve this problem, we propose (1) a new notion of freshness timestamp, (2) a new data structure to store timestamps, and (3) an algorithm that uses a combination of them to reduce the cost of timestamping in sampling based race detection. Further, we prove that our algorithm is close to optimal --- the number of vector clock traversals is bounded by the number of sampled events and number of threads, and further, on any given dynamic execution, the cost of timestamping due to our algorithm is close to the amount of work any timestamping-based algorithm must perform on that execution, that is it is instance optimal. Our evaluation on real world benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm over prior timestamping algorithms that are agnostic to sampling.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2007428
- PAR ID:
- 10657087
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- PLDI
- ISSN:
- 2475-1421
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 150 to 175
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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