What is cascading failure?

The excess loads continue passing down the line of neighboring servers, snowballing into larger and larger excess loads until the entire system crumbles. This type of cascading failure is a mix of overload and proximity-based failover feedback triggers, as mentioned below.

Can a system in cascading failure self-heal?

A system in cascading failure won’t self-heal; it’ll only be restored through human intervention. The third problem is that if the right conditions exist in your system, cascading failures can strike with no warning. Unfortunately, the basic preconditions for cascading failures are difficult to avoid: it’s simply failover.

Can a cascade of failures prevent system collapse?

While the problem of cascade of failures has been extensively studied in the last decade, researchers from different areas have begun recently to develop strategies to mitigate the effects of the cascades and avoiding system collapse. These strategies have been focused not only on mitigation of the cascade but also on the recovery of the systems.

What causes cascading failures in JavaScript?

This pattern has contributed to several cascading failures, whether the frontends and backends communicate via RPC messages, the “frontend” is client JavaScript code issuing XmlHttpRequest calls to an endpoint and retries on failure, or the retries originate from an offline sync protocol that retries aggressively when it encounters a failure.