A methodology for detection and estimation of software aging
Garg, S.; van Moorsel, A.; Vaidyanathan, K.; Trivedi, K.S.
Software Reliability Engineering, 1998. Proceedings. The Ninth International Symposium on
Volume , Issue , 4-7 Nov 1998 Page(s):283 - 292
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ISSRE.1998.730892
Summary:The phenomenon of software aging refers to the accumulation of
errors during the execution of the software which eventually results in
it's crash/hang failure. A gradual performance degradation may also
accompany software aging. Pro-active fault management techniques such as
“software rejuvenation” (Y. Huang et al., 1995) may be used
to counteract aging if it exists. We propose a methodology for detection
and estimation of aging in the UNIX operating system. First, we present
the design and implementation of an SNMP based, distributed monitoring
tool used to collect operating system resource usage and system activity
data at regular intervals, from networked UNIX workstations. Statistical
trend detection techniques are applied to this data to detect/validate
the existence of aging. For quantifying the effect of aging in operating
system resources, we propose a metric: “estimated time to
exhaustion”, which is calculated using well known slope estimation
techniques. Although the distributed data collection tool is specific to
UNIX, the statistical techniques can be used for detection and
estimation of aging in other software as well
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