User_Guides : Reverse Debugging with ReplayEngine™ : Understanding ReplayEngine : TotalView ReplayEngine: A New Paradigm in Debugging
TotalView ReplayEngine: A New Paradigm in Debugging
The hardest step in locating software bugs centers on working backward from a failure to the error that caused it. Conventional debugging techniques do not make it easy to find the cause of an error as they allow you to control program execution only in the forward direction.
Instead of going back to the beginning to try to recreate the conditions of a problem, ReplayEngine lets you start from the point of failure and work backward in time to find the cause. Recreating the conditions of a crash, sometimes the hardest problem in conventional forward debugging, is no longer necessary. You can now move to locate errors that occurred long before the failure they caused.
ReplayEngine is embedded within TotalView which means you must know how to use TotalView to take advantage of it. TotalView documentation is available both in this help set and at help.totalview.io.