Self-recovery in server programs

It is important that long running server programs retain availability amidst software failures. However, server programs do fail and one of the important causes of failures in server programs is due to memory errors. Software bugs in the server code like buffer overflows, integer overflows, etc. are exposed by certain user requests, leading to memory corruption, which can often result in crashes. One safe way of recovering from these crashes is to periodically checkpoint program state and rollback to the most recent checkpoint on a crash. However, checkpointing program state periodically can be quite expensive. Furthermore, since recovery can involve the rolling back of considerable state information in addition to replay of several benign user requests, the throughput and response time of the server can be reduced significantly during rollback recovery. In this paper, we first conducted a detailed study to see how memory corruption propagates in server programs. Our study shows t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IWMM
• Authors: Vijay Nagarajan, Dennis Jeffrey, Rajiv Gupta
• Keywords: IWMM 2009, Memory Locations, Operating System, Server Programs, User Requests