JVMKiller

In our latest release of SMB, we spent a fair amount of time testing and minimizing windows where data corruption can occur in our associative memory.  The testing involved killing various processes during periods of activity.  But rather than a hit-or-miss approach of randomly killing SMB processes and seeing if any sort of recovery was needed, we decided to build a JVMKiller that gave us control of when and how the JVM goes down.  We are now able to target specific “high risk” (write operations) areas.  Like everything else in our system, the JVMKiller is configured as a JavaBean.  The bean has the ability to execute any number of possible kill events, as well as, targeting both specific logical and physical components of the system, given a condition.  For example, we could target a certain event, like the start of a phase-2 save event:
(more…)