Communications of the ACM
Hanging Can Be Life Threatening
Although testing and static code analysis are used to detect and remove bugs in a system during development, problems can still occur once a software system is in place and is being used in a real-world application. Such problems can cause one critical component of the system to hang without crashing the whole system and without being immediately obvious to operators and users until it is too late.
Researchers at the Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II and at Naples company SESM SCARL have developed a software tool that offers non-obtrusive monitoring of systems, based on multiple sources of data gathered at the operating system level and collected data. "Our experimental results show that this framework increases the overall capacity of detecting hang failures, it exhibits a 100 percent coverage of observed failures, while keeping low the number of false positives, less than 6 percent in the worst case," according to the researchers.
They also say the response time, or latency, between a hang occurring and detection is about 0.1 seconds on average, while the impact on computer performance of running the hang-detection software is negligible.
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