@article{qiu_shao_zhao_khan_hui_jin_2022, title={A Deep Study of the Effects and Fixes of Server-Side Request Races in Web Applications}, ISSN={["2160-1852"]}, DOI={10.1145/3524842.3528463}, abstractNote={Server-side web applications are vulnerable to request races. While some previous studies of real-world request races exist, they primarily focus on the root cause of these bugs. To better combat request races in server-side web applications, we need a deep understanding of their characteristics. In this paper, we provide a complementary focus on race effects and fixes with an enlarged set of request races from web applications developed with Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks. We revisit characterization questions used in previous studies on newly included request races, distinguish the external and internal effects of request races, and relate requestrace fixes with concurrency control mechanisms in languages and frameworks for developing server-side web applications. Our study reveals that: (1) request races from ORM-based web applications share the same characteristics as those from raw-SQL web applications; (2) request races violating application semantics without explicit crashes and error messages externally are common, and latent request races, which only corrupt some shared resource internally but require extra requests to expose the misbehavior, are also common; and (3) various fix strategies other than using synchronization mechanisms are used to fix request races. We expect that our results can help developers better understand request races and guide the design and development of tools for combating request races.}, journal={2022 MINING SOFTWARE REPOSITORIES CONFERENCE (MSR 2022)}, author={Qiu, Zhengyi and Shao, Shudi and Zhao, Qi and Khan, Hassan Ali and Hui, Xinning and Jin, Guoliang}, year={2022}, pages={744–756} }
 @article{zhao_qiu_shao_hui_khan_jin_2022, title={Understanding and Reaching the Performance Limit of Schedule Tuning on Stable Synchronization Determinism}, DOI={10.1145/3559009.3569669}, abstractNote={Deterministic MultiThreading (DMT) systems eliminate nondeterminism from the dynamic executions of multithreaded programs. They can greatly simplify multithreaded programming and ease the deployment of systems that rely on replication. We first categorize and compare existing DMT system designs along three axes, incorporating the most recent advances in DMT systems. From our study, we conclude that stable synchronization determinism is the most cost-effective design, and it is thus the focus of our work. To reduce the overhead of enforcing stable synchronization determinism, previous work has explored scheduling-based methods that tune the synchronization schedule. However, it is not clear how low the performance overhead can be through schedule tuning and how to reach the performance limit. To answer these questions, we then follow an iterative process of understanding the performance limit of schedule tuning on stable synchronization determinism and designing new scheduling policies to reach the performance limit. Through this process, we identify two types of scheduling-oblivious overheads that cannot be eliminated by schedule tuning alone. In addition, we also design a group of new policies and implement them in minSMT. Our evaluation shows that minSMT successfully reaches the performance limit of stable synchronization determinism on 107 out of 108 benchmarks after excluding the impact of scheduling-oblivious overheads, and this also results in significant performance improvements compared with state-of-the-art stable synchronization-determinism systems on 9 benchmarks. Our results also suggest that, to further improve the performance of stable synchronization determinism, future research should focus on addressing the two types of scheduling-oblivious overheads with approaches other than schedule tuning.}, journal={PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2022 31ST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PARALLEL ARCHITECTURES AND COMPILATION TECHNIQUES, PACT 2022}, author={Zhao, Qi and Qiu, Zhengyi and Shao, Shudi and Hui, Xinning and Khan, Hassan Ali and Jin, Guoliang}, year={2022}, pages={223–238} }
 @article{qiu_shao_zhao_jin_2021, title={A Characteristic Study of Deadlocks in Database-Backed Web Applications}, ISSN={["1071-9458"]}, DOI={10.1109/ISSRE52982.2021.00059}, abstractNote={Deadlocks in database-backed web applications could involve different numbers of HTTP requests, and they could be caused by locks explicitly requested in application code or implicitly requested by databases during query execution. To help developers understand these deadlocks and guide the design of tools for combating these deadlocks, we conduct a characteristic study with 49 deadlocks collected from real-world web applications developed following different programming paradigms. We provide categorization results based on HTTP request numbers and resource types, with a special focus on cat-egorizing deadlocks on database locks. We expect our results to be useful for application developers to understand web-application deadlocks and for tool researchers to design comprehensive support for combating web-application deadlocks.}, journal={2021 IEEE 32ND INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON SOFTWARE RELIABILITY ENGINEERING (ISSRE 2021)}, author={Qiu, Zhengyi and Shao, Shudi and Zhao, Qi and Jin, Guoliang}, year={2021}, pages={510–521} }
 @article{qiu_zhao_shao_jin_2021, title={Understanding and Detecting Server-Side Request Races in Web Applications}, DOI={10.1145/3468264.3468594}, abstractNote={Modern web sites often run web applications on the server to handle HTTP requests from users and generate dynamic responses. Due to their concurrent nature, web applications are vulnerable to server-side request races. The problem becomes more severe with the ever-increasing popularity of web applications. We first conduct a comprehensive characteristic study of 157 real-world server-side request races collected from different, popular types of web applications. The findings of this study can provide guidance for future development support in combating server-side request races. Guided by our study results, we develop a dynamic framework, ReqRacer, for detecting and exposing server-side request races in web applications. We propose novel approaches to model happens-before relationships between HTTP requests, which are essential to web applications. Our evaluation shows that ReqRacer can effectively and efficiently detect known and unknown request races.}, journal={PROCEEDINGS OF THE 29TH ACM JOINT MEETING ON EUROPEAN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CONFERENCE AND SYMPOSIUM ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (ESEC/FSE '21)}, author={Qiu, Zhengyi and Zhao, Qi and Shao, Shudi and Jin, Guoliang}, year={2021}, pages={842–854} }
 @article{zhao_qiu_jin_2019, title={Semantics-Aware Scheduling Policies for Synchronization Determinism}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3293883.3295731}, DOI={10.1145/3293883.3295731}, abstractNote={A common task for all deterministic multithreading (DMT) systems is to enforce synchronization determinism. However, synchronization determinism has not been the focus of existing DMT research. Instead, most DMT systems focused on how to order data races remained after synchronization determinism is enforced. Consequently, existing scheduling policies for synchronization determinism all have limitations. They may either require performance annotations to achieve good performance or fail to provide schedule stability. In this paper, we argue that synchronization determinism is more fundamental to DMT systems than existing research suggests and propose efficient and effective scheduling policies. Our key insight is that synchronization operations actually encode programmers' intention on how inter-thread communication should be done and can be used as hints while scheduling synchronization operations. Based on this insight, we have built QiThread, a synchronization-determinism system with semantics-aware scheduling policies. Results of a diverse set of 108 programs show that QiThread is able to achieve comparable low overhead as state-of-the-art synchronization-determinism systems without the limitations associated with them.}, journal={PROCEEDINGS OF THE 24TH SYMPOSIUM ON PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF PARALLEL PROGRAMMING (PPOPP '19)}, author={Zhao, Qi and Qiu, Zhengyi and Jin, Guoliang}, year={2019}, pages={242–256} }
 @article{sagara_midorikawa_shultz_zhao_1998, title={Electrochemical and Spectroelectrochemical Study of a Bis(arylgalvinol)-Substituted Alkyl Disulfide Monolayer and Mixed Monolayers on Polycrystalline Gold}, volume={14}, ISSN={0743-7463 1520-5827}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/la980136z}, DOI={10.1021/la980136z}, abstractNote={The monolayer of bis(arylgalvinol)-substituted alkyl disulfide and mixed monolayers with decanethiol (DT) on a polycrystalline gold electrode were characterized in an aqueous solution by means of cyclic voltammetry and in situ electroreflectance (ER) spectroscopy. Both neat and mixed monolayers exhibited a quasi-reversible redox response of galvinol/galvinoxyl radical couple (GalH/Gal•) at the same formal potentials. The ER signal involved responses due to both the redox reaction and the Stark effect on Gal•. The ER spectrum of the redox reaction showed a difference absorption spectral feature, and it was found that the absorption bands of both immobilized GalH and Gal• are red shifted in comparison to their absorption bands measured in organic solvents. The ER spectral profile for the redox reaction was unaffected by mixing with DT, while the contribution of Stark effect on Gal• to the ER signal was significantly suppressed by increasing the amount of DT in the monolayer. The amount of immobilized GalH i...}, number={13}, journal={Langmuir}, publisher={American Chemical Society (ACS)}, author={Sagara, Takamasa and Midorikawa, Takahiro and Shultz, David A. and Zhao, Qi}, year={1998}, month={Jun}, pages={3682–3690} }
 @article{brousseau_zhao_shultz_feldheim_1998, title={pH-Gated Single-Electron Tunneling in Chemically Modified Gold Nanoclusters}, volume={120}, ISSN={0002-7863 1520-5126}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja981262s}, DOI={10.1021/ja981262s}, abstractNote={ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEPREVCommunicationNEXTpH-Gated Single-Electron Tunneling in Chemically Modified Gold NanoclustersLouis C. Brousseau, Qi Zhao, David A. Shultz, and Daniel L. FeldheimView Author Information Department of Chemistry, North Carolina State University Raleigh, North Carolina 27695 Cite this: J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1998, 120, 30, 7645–7646Publication Date (Web):July 21, 1998Publication History Received15 April 1998Published online21 July 1998Published inissue 1 August 1998https://doi.org/10.1021/ja981262sCopyright © 1998 American Chemical SocietyRIGHTS & PERMISSIONSArticle Views361Altmetric-Citations75LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InReddit Read OnlinePDF (42 KB) Get e-AlertscloseSupporting Info (1)»Supporting Information Supporting Information SUBJECTS:Cluster chemistry,Electrical properties,Gold,Nanoclusters,Nanoparticles Get e-Alerts}, number={30}, journal={Journal of the American Chemical Society}, publisher={American Chemical Society (ACS)}, author={Brousseau, Louis C. and Zhao, Qi and Shultz, David A. and Feldheim, Daniel L.}, year={1998}, month={Aug}, pages={7645–7646} }