Containment and recovery of software exceptions in interacting, replicated-state-machine-based fault-tolerant components

摘要

A method, system and article of manufacture are disclosed for error recovery in a replicated state machine. A batch of inputs is input to the machine, and the machine uses a multitude of components for processing those inputs. Also, during this processing, one of said components generates an exception. The method comprises the steps of after the exception, rolling the state machine back to a defined point in the operation of the machine; preemptively failing said one of the components; re-executing the input batch in the state machine; and handling any failure, during the re-executing step, of the one of the components using a defined error handling procedure. The rolling, preemptively failing, re-executing and handling steps are repeated until the input batch runs to completion without generating any exception in any of the components that are not preemptively failed.