Fault-tolerance for stateful application servers in the presence of advanced transactions patterns

Replication is widely used in application server products to tolerate faults. An important challenge is to correctly coordinate replication and transaction execution for stateful application servers. Many current solutions assume that a single client request generates exactly one transaction at the server. However, it is quite common that several client requests are encapsulated within one server transaction or that a single client request can initiate several server transactions. In this paper, we propose a replication tool that is able to handle these variations in request/transaction association. We have integrated our approach into the J2EE application server JBoss. Our evaluation using the ECPerf benchmark shows a low overhead of the approach.