  High-availability of software systems requires automated handling of crashes
in presence of errors. Failure-oblivious computing is one technique that aims
to achieve high availability. We note that failure-obliviousness has not been
studied in depth yet, and there is very few study that helps understand why
failure-oblivious techniques work. In order to make failure-oblivious computing
to have an impact in practice, we need to deeply understand failure-oblivious
behaviors in software. In this paper, we study, design and perform an
experiment that analyzes the size and the diversity of the failure-oblivious
behaviors. Our experiment consists of exhaustively computing the search space
of 16 field failures of large-scale open-source Java software. The outcome of
this experiment is a much better understanding of what really happens when
failure-oblivious computing is used, and this opens new promising research
directions.
