Exhaustive Exploration of the Failure-Oblivious Computing Search Space

Abstract

High-availability of software systems requires automated handling of crashes in presence of errors. Failure-oblivious computing is one technique that aims to achieve high availability.We note that failure-obliviousness has not been studied in depth yet, and there is very few study that helps understand why failureoblivious techniques work. In order to make failure-oblivious computing to have an impact in practice, we need to deeply understand failure-oblivious behaviors in software. In this paper, we study, design and perform an experiment that analyzes the size and the diversity of the failure-oblivious behaviors. Our experiment consists of exhaustively computing the search space of 16 field failures of large-scale open-source Java software. The outcome of this experiment is a much better understanding of what really happens when failure-oblivious computing is used, and this opens new promising research directions.• The characterization of the concept of "search space of failure-oblivious computing". • An algorithm to exhaustively explore this novel search space.

TripleAgent: Monitoring, Perturbation and Failure-Obliviousness for Automated Resilience Improvement in Java Applications

“…For example, if a method tries to write data into an invalid memory address, with failure-oblivious computing, the writing operation would be ignored. It has been shown that failureoblivious computing is able to increase availability [9], [29], [30], eg to serve requests to more users despite errors.…”

“…c) Fault model: In this paper, we consider two fault models: 1) injecting only one exception, when the perturbation point is reached for the first time and 2) always injecting exceptions when the perturbation point is reached. d) Perturbation search space: We define the "perturbation search space" as the Cartesian product of all possible perturbation points and all fault models with respect to a workload [8], [9]. The size of the search space is the number of workload executions required to have an exhaustive picture of the behavior under perturbation.…”

“…d) Perturbation search space: We define the "perturbation search space" as the Cartesian product of all possible perturbation points and all fault models with respect to a workload [8], [9]. The size of the search space is the number of workload executions required to have an exhaustive picture of the behavior under perturbation.…”

“…Failure-oblivious computing is about adding fully generic error-handling code with automated code transformation [30]. In the context of exceptions, failure-oblivious computing means automatically adding catch blocks with a default exception-handling strategy [9] In this paper, our goal is to automatically improve the exception-handling code of software applications. This is made by first finding weaknesses in resilience and then instrumenting the application with automated exception handling.…”

Context-Aware Failure-Oblivious Computing as a Means of Preventing Buffer Overflows

“…Failure-oblivious computing models. Durieux et al studied failure-oblivious computing behaviors [9]. Their findings suggest that for many failures, multiple alternative strategies exist that can mitigate the error.…”