Will a thread that dies cause the whole application to die?

Question

For a critical business application, is there away of preventing the whole application from crashing when a thread dies unexpectedly (when performing a critical task for example)?
We can not afford that the whole application hangs due to an individual thread problem.
Our alternative is to go for multi-process design, but we still prefer multi-threading.
We would appreciate if someone could share their thoughts and experiences on this.

Answer 1

Thanks for your replies!!
It must not be possible that the
application dies when a trader is performing a
critical task.Of course, one can never guarantee the integrity of an application. Like the doctors always say, ".. there's always risk involved even in the most routine procederes." So bet on it being possible.
A few questions to your replies:
- What is exactly a self contained thread?I don't know exactly what the poster means by self contained. But he may be referring to threads that are independent of one another i.e., threads that don't block and the work produced by each thread has little or no consequence on any other thread. I'm not sure I can think of many practical applications for such a model given the context you provide.
- What makes the application "uncrashable" when using
self contained threads?Well, again, only mythical applications are "uncrashable". Even an independent thread can crash its containing process. Independent threads are relatively safe from one another only in that they cannot cause dead lock in your app.
- Can Fail Over Design be used also for client
applications?
Not really. Fail over usually involves cooperating processes on different machines. But with proper deadlock detection you can approximate some aspects of fail over in a single process multithreaded application.