On Synchronous and Asynchronous Monitor Instrumentation for Actor-based systems

TL;DR

This paper compares synchronous and asynchronous monitoring in actor-based systems, demonstrating asynchronous methods are more efficient, and proposing a hybrid approach for properties needing synchronous detection to balance timeliness and overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid monitoring approach that combines synchronous and asynchronous techniques to optimize overhead and detection timeliness in actor systems.

Findings

Asynchronous monitoring has significantly lower overhead.

Hybrid monitoring achieves timely violation detection with reduced overhead.

The approach balances detection accuracy and performance efficiency.

Abstract

We study the impact of synchronous and asynchronous monitoring instrumentation on runtime overheads in the context of a runtime verification framework for actor-based systems. We show that, in such a context, asynchronous monitoring incurs substantially lower overhead costs. We also show how, for certain properties that require synchronous monitoring, a hybrid approach can be used that ensures timely violation detections for the important events while, at the same time, incurring lower overhead costs that are closer to those of an asynchronous instrumentation.