HangFix: Automatically fixing software hang bugs for production cloud systems

Abstract

Software hang bugs are notoriously difficult to debug, which often cause serious service outages in cloud systems. In this paper, we present HangFix, a software hang bug fixing framework which can automatically fix a hang bug that is triggered and detected in production cloud environments. HangFix first leverages stack trace analysis to localize the hang function and then performs root cause pattern matching to classify hang bugs into different types based on likely root causes. Next, HangFix generates effective code patches based on the identified root cause patterns. We have implemented a prototype of HangFix and evaluated the system on 42 real-world software hang bugs in 10 commonly used cloud server applications. Our results show that HangFix can successfully fix 40 out of 42 hang bugs in seconds.