I've been debugging plenty of distributed/parallel processing systems by trace statements. It's not trivially easy, but its not too bad (its actually kind of f

I've been debugging plenty of distributed/parallel processing systems by trace statements. It's not trivially easy, but its not too bad (its actually kind of fun). In fact, I'm not exactly sure how you would debug a multi-process parallel system with an external debugger. Would you simultaneously use multiple debugger instances to attach to each process? That sounds like fun. For a true, parallel system it's virtually impossible to "examine the entire program's behavior" at any one instance in time. Sure printing changes the timing of things, but unless you are single threaded, you are kidding yourself to think that a debugger also doesn't disrupt timings.