Issues with Distributed Systems

In order to effectively design, debug, and manage your distributed system, it is important to consider the following needs:

• Determining and ensuring the proper order of activities performed across processes and threads
• Tracking control flow of messages between processes, unobtrusively
• Identifying interrelationships between distributed components
• Identifying opportunities for optimizing performance such as load balancing

When working with a top down architectural view we need to bear in mind:

• Events and other CORBA messages drive execution
• Causal relationships across processes are presently difficult to track
• Very little information is available to support "optimal" component deployment

Standard types of source debugging tools for instance do not address these kinds of issues. The reasons being:

• Focus is on the execution of a single process
• Usage affects memory footprint and timing
• Requires strategic placement of breakpoints to capture flow

Even RTOS oriented tools, which are designed to support the development of quite complex systems only have the perspective of a single-card/board system. As a result they:

• Cannot provide information about multiple cards/chassis
• Can only be applied once some sort of fault isolation has narrowed the problem scope.