PROGRAMMING Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical

Xu Zhao is a graduate student at the University of Toronto. He received a B.Eng. in computer science from Tsinghua University, China. At U of T, his research is focused on reliability and performance of distributed systems. [email protected] Large, production-quality distributed systems still fail periodically, sometimes catastrophically where most or all users experience an outage or data loss. Conventional wisdom has it that these failures can only manifest themselves on large production clusters and are extremely difficult to prevent a priori, because these systems are designed to be fault tolerant and are well-tested. By investigating 198 user-reported failures that occurred on production-quality distributed systems, we found that almost all (92%) of the catastrophic system failures are the result of incorrect handling of non-fatal errors, and, surprisingly, many of them are caused by trivial mistakes such as error handlers that are empty or that contain expressions like “FIXME” or “TODO” in the comments. We therefore developed a simple static checker, Aspirator, capable of locating trivial bugs in error handlers; it found 143 new bugs and bad practices that have been fixed or confirmed by the developers.