Communications of the ACM
Kode Vicious
Forced Exception Handling
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Dear KV,
I subscribe to "The Morning Paper," a daily summary prepared by one person, Adrian Colyer, who curates research papers and sends them out to interested readers (https://blog.acolyer.org). Last fall he reviewed "Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed DataIntensive Systems" (https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/10/06/simple-testing-can-prevent-most-critical-failures/). It had some surprising results, including:
- Almost all catastrophic failures (48 in total, or 92%) are the result of incorrect handling of nonfatal errors explicitly signaled in software;
- Error handlers with TODO or FIXME in the comments. This example took down a 4,000-node production cluster; and
- Error handlers that catch an abstract exception type (for example, Exception or Throwable in Java) and then take drastic action such as aborting the system. This example brought down a whole Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) cluster.
And the list went on from there.
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