Gsoc2008 Stability And Crash Recovery

Crash Recovery For Mixxx (GSoC 2008 project)

• Student: Zack Elko
• Mentor: Adam Davison

Abstract

An application such as Mixxx which I consider to be mission critical in a lot of contexts, should never crash. But, this is software, and things do happen. In that event, the application must be able to recover gracefully from such an event. My initial thoughts of how to address this issue would be to keep track of the current state of the Mixxx session at consistent intervals so that the session could be restored quickly upon restart after a crash. The effect would be similar to what happens in Mozilla Firefox when the browser is exited abnormally. Of course, Mixxx is a bit different than a web browser. Those experiencing the music produced by a DJ using Mixxx will have had their experience interrupted very abruptly, and to simply go from loud music to silence, and back to loud music isn't exactly ideal (or safe). This is an area that will require a lot of testing and tweaking to get right, but it's one of the most important areas of the crash recovery.