Modeling and analysis of software rejuvenation on dispatcher-based web server farms

Software rejuvenation is a recently proposed practive fault-tolerance approach to counteract software-aging phenomenon. Compared with clusters of a flat architecture, all the nodes share the same functions. The application of software rejuvenation on dispatcher-based web server farms is discussed, which employ rejuvenation both on the dispatcher and the worker pool. Stochastic reward net (SRN)models for time-based and prediction-based rejuvenation policies are constructed respectively and solved by stochastic Petri net package (SPNP). Numerical results show that appropriate rejuvenation strategies on the dispatcher and the worker pool could significantly reduce the expected downtime cost of the whole web server farm.