Fail-fast
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In systems design, a fail-fast system is one which immediately reports at its interface any condition that is likely to indicate a failure. Fail-fast systems are usually designed to stop normal operation rather than attempt to continue a possibly flawed process. Such designs often check the system's state at several points in an operation, so any failures can be detected early. A fail-fast module passes the responsibility for handling errors, but not detecting them, to the next-highest level of the system.
Fail-fast systems or modules are desirable in several circumstances:
- When building a fault-tolerant system by means of redundant components, the individual components should be fail-fast to give the system enough information to successfully tolerate a failure.
- Fail-fast components are often used in situations where failure in one component might not be visible until it leads to failure in another component.
- Finding the cause of a failure is easier in a fail-fast system, because the system reports the failure with as much information as possible as close to the time of failure as possible. In a fault-tolerant system, the failure might go undetected, whereas in a system that is neither fault-tolerant nor fail-fast the failure might be temporarily hidden until it causes some seemingly unrelated problem later.
- A fail-fast system that is designed to halt as well as report the error on failure is less likely to erroneously perform an irreversible or costly operation.
Examples[edit]
From the field of software engineering, a Fail Fast Iterator is an iterator that attempts to raise an error if the sequence of elements processed by the iterator is changed during iteration.
See also[edit]
- Crash-only software
- Design by contract
- Failing badly vs. failing well
- Fail-safe
- Fail-stop
- Fail-silent system
External links[edit]
- Gray, Jim. "Why Do Computers Stop And What Can Be Done About It?". CiteSeerX: 10
.1 .1 .110 .9127, introducing 'Fail Fast' - "Fail Fast" Article by Jim Shore explaining using 'Fail Fast' concept in software development (from 'columns for IEEE software' edited by Martin Fowler)
