Architecture-driven diagnosis of performance failures in a token ring
Andrew Williams, Priya Lakshmi Narasimhan · Hot Topics in System Dependability · 2007
Communication infrastructures that provide distributed systems with key services can also end up being the medium whereby faults propagate through the system. We have previously observed that a single faulty node can degrade the performance of other, non-faulty nodes in the system. We present a method for identifying the node that is the origin of the failure by examining the architecture-driven constrained network-flows in a distributed system. By identifying the effects of the failure on the network, combined with our knowledge of the network-flow constraints, we can trace the effects of the failure back to its source node. We empirically evaluate our methods on a data set that was generated by injecting multiple performance-faults into a replicated middleware system with an underlying token-ring based group communication protocol. We correctly identify the faulty node in the case of failures that significantly change the performance characteristics of the network.