page_title: Failure detector
section_title: Failure detector
hierarchical_section_title: Failure detector / Origin / Failure detector
caption_attribution_description: English: This describes the behavior of a failure detector.
context_page_description: In a distributed computing system, a failure detector is a computer application or a subsystem that is responsible for the detection of node failures or crashes. Failure detectors were first introduced in 1996 by Chandra and Toueg in their book Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems. The book depicts the failure detector as a tool to improve consensus and atomic broadcast in the distributed system. In other word, failure detectors seek for errors in the process, and the system will maintain a level of reliability. In practice, after failure detectors spot crashes, the system will ban the processes that are making mistakes to prevent any further serious crashes or errors.
  In the 21st century, failure detectors are widely used in distributed computing systems to detect application errors, such as a software application stops functioning properly. As the distributed computing projects become more and more popular, the usage of the failure detects also becomes important and critical.
context_section_description: Chandra and Toueg claimed that an unreliable failure detector can still be reliable in detecting the errors made by the system. They generalize unreliable failure detectors to all forms of failure detectors because unreliable failure detectors and failure detectors share the same properties. Furthermore, Chandra and Toueg point out an important fact that the failure detector does not prevent any crashes in the system, even if the crashed program has been suspected previously. The construction of a failure detector is an essential, but a very difficult problem that occurred in the development of the fault-tolerant component in a distributed computer system. As a result, the failure detector was invented because of the need for detecting errors in the massive information transaction in distributed computing systems.
caption: This picture describes the behavior of a typical failure detector (FD).
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