A practice guide of software aging prediction in a web server based on machine learning

In the past two decades, software aging has been studied by both academic and industry communities. Many scholars focused on analytical methods or time series to model software aging process. While machine learning has been shown as a very promising technique in application to forecast software state: normal or aging. In this paper, we proposed a method which can give practice guide to forecast software aging using machine learning algorithm. Firstly, we collected data from a running commercial web server and preprocessed these data. Secondly, feature selection algorithm was applied to find a subset of model parameters set. Thirdly, time series model was used to predict values of selected parameters in advance. Fourthly, some machine learning algorithms were used to model software aging process and to predict software aging. Fifthly, we used sensitivity analysis to analyze how heavily outcomes changed following input variables change. In the last, we applied our method to an IIS web server. Through analysis of the experiment results, we find that our proposed method can predict software aging in the early stage of system development life cycle.