Scale and performance in a distributed file system
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Fault Injection Experiments Using FIAT
IEEE Transactions on Computers
VLDB '89 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Very large data bases
Measurements of a distributed file system
SOSP '91 Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Performance evaluation of extended storage architectures for transaction processing
SIGMOD '92 Proceedings of the 1992 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Non-volatile memory for fast, reliable file systems
ASPLOS V Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
The Zebra striped network file system
SOSP '93 Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
FINE: A Fault Injection and Monitoring Environment for Tracing the UNIX System Behavior Under Faults
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special issue on software reliability
Distributed operating systems
eNVy: a non-volatile, main memory storage system
ASPLOS VI Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
FERRARI: A Flexible Software-Based Fault and Error Injection System
IEEE Transactions on Computers - Special issue on fault-tolerant computing
Estimators for Fault Tolerance Coverage Evaluation
IEEE Transactions on Computers - Special issue on fault-tolerant computing
The Rio file cache: surviving operating system crashes
Proceedings of the seventh international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
A trace-driven analysis of the UNIX 4.2 BSD file system
Proceedings of the tenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Management of Partially Safe Buffers
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Main Memory Database Systems: An Overview
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Software Dependability in the Tandem GUARDIAN System
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Classification and Comparison of Main Memory Database Recovery Techniques
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Data Engineering
FTCS'95 Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth international conference on Fault-tolerant computing
On the Analysis of On-Line Database Reorganization
ADBIS-DASFAA '00 Proceedings of the East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems Held Jointly with International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications: Current Issues in Databases and Information Systems
Conquest: Better Performance Through a Disk/Persistent-RAM Hybrid File System
ATEC '02 Proceedings of the General Track of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
The Conquest file system: Better performance through a disk/persistent-RAM hybrid design
ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS)
Emulation of Software Faults: A Field Data Study and a Practical Approach
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Exploiting commodity hard-disk geometry to efficiently preserve data consistency
EPEW'07 Proceedings of the 4th European performance engineering conference on Formal methods and stochastic models for performance evaluation
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Memory is commonly viewed as an unreliable place to store permanent data (files) because it is perceived to be vulnerable to system crashes. Yet despite all the negative implications of memory's unreliability, no data exists that quantifies how vulnerable memory actually is to system crashes. This paper quantitatively compares the vulnerability of disk and memory to operating system crashes. We use software fault injection to induce a wide variety of operating system crashes in DEC Alpha workstations running Digital Unix, ranging from bit errors in the kernel stack to deleting branch instructions to C-level allocation management errors. We find that files on disk are rarely corrupted (1.1% corruption rate), which agrees with our intuition. We also find that, surprisingly files in memory are nearly as safe as files on disk. Only 10 of the 650 crashes we observed (1.5%) corrupt any files in memory. Our data contradicts the common assumption that operating system crashes often corrupt files in memory and suggests that memory can be used to store permanent data rather than needing to write it back to disk.