Static analysis tool to detect multithreading problems (deadlocks, race conditions, not-looped wait, etc.)
I am shopping for a STATIC ANALYSIS TOOL that can tell me if our code suffers from deadlocks, race conditions and bad practices in general.
I know that FindBugs and PMD do already something like this, but recently our app came to a halt due to a deadlock and neither of those warned us about it.
Whether the tool is free, open-source or not is not relevant. I just need someting that does the job of finding multithreading problems faster than our users.
Source: Tips4all, CCNA FINAL EXAM
I had a nice chat a month or two ago with some guys from a local startup that are working on exactly to tool you describe.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.contemplateltd.com/products/threadsafe
It works, but sadly I don't think you can actually buy it yet.
If you are serious (in terms of willingness to throw man- and computing power at the problem), I recommend Java PathFinder. There's not much that static analysis will do in practice here, I'm afraid.
ReplyDeleteCheckThread is a good static analysis tool for just such problems. It does require that you declaratively mark you code with how you expect it to be used (eg applying @ThreadSafe annotation decalres that you expect your method to behave well when called concurrently), but it is highly useful nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteThe tool that answers your question "I just need something that does the job of finding multithreading problems faster than our users" exists. It is called SUM4Java.
ReplyDeleteYou can find a link to a demo sample at the end of this page (please forgive the simplicity of the text that is using analogies, as it was written for a different audience)
http://thinkingsoftware.com/Parallel/Parallel.html
A demo on the example of NASA open source WorldWind (analogous to Google Earth) can be found from the "Watch Demo" button on the first page of the same site http://ThinkingSoftware.com
(Disclaimer: I work for Thinking Software, Inc)