Stresses induced on a system cause it to fail. Examples include
paging monsters that result in excessive paging and reduced performance,
process viruses that consume various system resources, and large numbers of
network packets per unit time which tie up systems by forcing excessive
high-priority network interrupt processing.
Complexity: Although some
attacks of this sort appear to be available without substantial effort, in
general, understanding the implications of stress on multiprocessing systems
is beyond the current theory. It appears from a cursory examination that
this is at least as complex as the interrupt sequence problem which appears
to be factorial in the number of instructions in each of the simultaneous
processes.
fc@red.a.net
