Windows Crash Analysis Results.pptVIP

Windows Crash Analysis Results Archana Ganapathi Department of EECS, UC Berkeley (archanag@cs.berkeley.edu) Motivation (1) “If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact, not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.” –Shimon Peres Motivation (2) Build an Oracle for System Behavior Determine dominant failure cause Drive benchmarks Evaluate our ideas via prototypes tested using benchmarks Help us select problems to tackle Current Data Collection Process Dataset 214 machines from Berkeley EECS department, ~7 months, ~1500 crashes Windows XP SP1 Low variability in usage profile Collection Process Modify group policy to auto direct crash reports to local server Easy-to-install CER software for server No prompt for user to send crash report Frequency of collection synchronized with application and system crashes on computers Crash count per month Sample Results Crash Behavior on a Machine Common Hypotheses Microsoft OS is unreliable and causes most crashes Web browsers crash more than other apps Applications hang as frequently as they crash Crashes occur roughly as much in 3rd party dlls as MS dlls Application Categories Microsoft OS is unreliable and causes most crashes - FALSE System Crashes XP operating system crashes very rarely! More impacting…most require reboot 9/1500 isn’t enough data to study system crashes!! Use BOINC to collect system crash data User behavior study How regularly do people use different applications? Do people behave differently if different things crash? How frequently do people proactively reboot their computer for system stability? Web browsers crash more than other apps - TRUE Web Browser usage vs crash Limitations of this analysis No info on how long each application was used before crash Need metrics on system and application usage Skewed by user community’s usage patterns User survey limitations Data only as accurate as user reports Difficult to estimate time spent using each application Hard to dis