Software aging
In software engineering, software aging refers to progressive performance degradation or a sudden hang/crash of a software system due to exhaustion of operating system resources, fragmentation, and/or accumulation of errors. A proactive fault management method to deal with the software aging phenomenon is software rejuvenation. This method can be classified as an environment diversity technique that usually is implemented through software rejuvenation agents (SRA). The simplest ways to emulate software rejuvenation are to reboot the system or find, close and restart the aging application.
Memory leaks are a potential cause or contributing factor in software aging, as they can exhaust available system memory.
References
- R. Matias Jr. and P. J. Freitas Filho, "An experimental study on software aging and rejuvenation in web servers," Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC'06), Vol. 01, pp. 189 – 196, 2006.
- M. Grottke, R. Matias Jr., and K. S. Trivedi, "The Fundamentals of Software Aging," Workshop of Software Aging and Rejuvenation (WoSAR/ISSRE), 2008.
- R. Matias Jr, P. Barbetta, K. Trivedi, P. Freitas Filho "Accelerated Degradation Tests Applied to Software Aging Experiments," IEEE Transactions on Reliability 59(1): 102-114,2010.
- M. Grottke, L. Li, K. Vaidyanathan, and K.S. Trivedi, "Analysis of software aging in a web server," IEEE Transactions on Reliability, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 411–420, 2006.
- M. Grottke, K. Trivedi, "Fighting Bugs: Remove, Retry, Replicate, and Rejuvenate," IEEE Computer 40(2): 107-109, 2007.
- More papers on Proceedings of Workshop of Software Aging and Rejuvenation (WoSAR'08,'10, '11, '12, '13, '14) at IEEE Xplore.