Delay Balance

I’ve just finished the last instrumentor to delays to programs. That means my instrumentation is currently inserting delays before

• monitorenter
• Object.wait
• Object.notify
• Object.notifyAll
• Thread.join
• Thread.exit

and delays after

• monitorenter
• monitorexit
• Object.wait
• Thread.join
• Thread.start
• Thread.run

After I added delays before and after calls to Object.wait, though, the test case with the early notification ^[1] wasn’t hanging anymore. I think because now I have delays in all the important places, on average the delays often balance out and preserve the original order.

I think what I want to do is try to skew the schedule maximally in one way and then in the other, e.g. first put delays on wait but not on notify, then in another run do it the other way around.

The following of those relationships come to mind:

• Object.wait vs. Object.notify, Object.notifyAll
• Thread.run vs. Thread.join
• Thread.run vs. Thread.start
• Thread.exit vs. Thread.start

There are many combinations here, especially since some of these sync points may have delays before and after them. I definitely need to investigate the relationships more closely… when I’m more awake.

Update

Another idea instead of random delays are calls to Thread.yield that occur randomly.