Exhaustive Exploration of the Failure-oblivious Computing Search Space

TL;DR

This paper conducts an exhaustive analysis of failure-oblivious computing behaviors across 16 real-world Java failures, revealing the diversity and scope of possible failure-handling strategies to inform future research and practical applications.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive exploration of the failure-oblivious search space, offering insights into its size, diversity, and implications for software reliability.

Findings

Failure-oblivious behaviors are highly diverse.

The search space for failure-oblivious strategies is large.

Understanding this space can guide better failure-handling techniques.

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 failure-oblivious 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.