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Impact of Software Aging Issues on Systems Performance

The study of software dependability metrics is required since the consequences of software failures very often cause enormous economic and reputational losses. An important threat is the phenomenon of software aging, an inevitable process where the application processes suffer from performance degradation throughout their use. Some proactive actions may be taken to minimize the aging effects, but these solutions are very specific to each environment under analysis. The aging phenomenon in cloud systems deserves special attention since such environment should provide characteristics such as high availability, high stability, high fault tolerance and dynamical extensibility. This talk presents main concepts and impacts of software aging in computer systems and also describes the results of previous investigations of memory leak, memory fragmentation, and others aging effects on the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure. Rejuvenation strategies are proposed and its benefits are highlighted through an experiment that activates the rejuvenation mechanism when the Eucalyptus process reaches critical levels of virtual memory utilization.