Experimental Performance Comparison of Dynamic Data Race Detection Techniques

Data races are one of the most difficult types of bugs in concurrent multithreaded systems. It requires significant time and cost to accurately detect bugs in complex largescale programs. Although many race detection techniques have been proposed by various researchers, none of them are effective in all aspects. In this paper, we compare the performance of five recent dynamic race detection techniques: FastTrack, Acculock, Multilock-HB, SimpleLock+, and causally precedes (CP) detection. We experimentally demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of these dynamic race detection techniques in terms of their detection capability, running time, and runtime overhead using 20 benchmark programs with different characteristics. The comparison results show that the detection capability of CP detection does not differ from that of FastTrack, and that SimpleLock+ generates the lowest overhead among the hybrid detection techniques (Acculock, SimpleLock+, and Multilock-HB) for all benchmark programs. SimpleLock+ is 1.2 times slower than FastTrack on average, but misses one true data race reported from Mutilock-HB on the large-scale benchmark programs.