The Influence of Layered System Structure on Strategies for Software.pdf

The Influence of Layered System Structure on Strategies for Software Rejuvenation Olivia Das, C. Murray Woodside Dept. of Systems and Comput er Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada email: odas@sce.carleton.ca, cmw@sce.carleton.ca Abstract It would be valuable to include the effects of software aging and rej uvenation on the failures of servers, which Hardware comp onents exhibit degradation f aults. Sim- can induce failures of applications at higher layers. ilar to hardware compo nents, several recent studies have Servers in this context can also include processors. Thus, described the p henomenon of “sof tware aging ” where the this abstract extends the model of layered systems [3], p erf ormance and reliability of the sof tware system with : degrades with time. In an attemp t to decrease the • aging for hardware as well as software components. unp lanned outages due to ag ing, a p roactive technique We assume that aging affects both performance and called “sof tware rej uvenation ” can be emp loy ed. This failure rate of components. technique involves stopp ing the running sof tware, clean- • effect of software rej uvenation. ing its internal state and restarting it. This extended abstract describes avenues f or evaluating the eff ective-