Types of Failures in Distributed Systems

There are different types of failure across the distributed system and few of them are given in this section as below

Crash failures:  Crash failures are caused across the server of a typical distributed system and if these failures are occurred operations of the server are halt for some time. Operating system failures are the best examples for this case and the corresponding fault tolerant systems are developed with respect to these affects.

Timing failures: Timing failures are caused across the server of a distributed system. The usual behavior of these timing failures would be like that the server response time towards the client requests would be more than the expected range. Control flow out of the responses may be caused due to these timing failures and the corresponding clients may give up as they can’t wait for the required response from the server and thus the server operations are failed due to this.

Omission failures: Omission failures are caused across the server due to lack or reply or response from the server across the distributed systems. There are different issues raised due to these omission failures and the key among them are server not listening or a typical buffer overflow errors across the servers of the distributed systems.

Byzantine failures:  Byzantine failures are also know as arbitrary failures and these failures are caused across the server of the distributed systems. These failures cause the server to behave arbitrary in nature and the server responds in an arbitrary passion at arbitrary times across the distributed systems. Output from the server would be inappropriate and there could be chances of the malicious events and duplicate messages from the server side and the clients get arbitrary and unwanted duplicate updates from the server due to these failures. 

Above are the important failures identified across the distributed systems.

This paper is written and submitted by sai