Software Aging and Rejuvenation in a J2EE Application Server

Recently, software aging and software rejuvenation have been widely researched by both academic and industrial communities. Software aging is characterized by progressive performance degradation or a sudden hang/crash in a long-running software system due to resource exhaustion of the operating system. Software rejuvenation is a proactive and preventive maintenance technique to counteract software aging. In this work, the memory leak in Java virtual machine (JVM) is firstly analyzed, and then the software aging phenomenon in a J2EE application server is investigated. To mitigate software aging effects and prevent the system from failing, the hierarchical software rejuvenation method by partial or total restarting of the system is presented. Finally, the experimental results proved that the proposed method is superior to the periodical rejuvenation method in the aspect of improving system performance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.