Software Aging and Rejuvenation in a SOAP-based Server

Web-services and service-oriented architectures are gaining momentum in the area of distributed systems and Internet applications. However, as we increase the abstraction level of the applications we are also increasing the complexity of the underlying middleware. In this paper, we present a dependability benchmarking study to evaluate and compare the robustness of some of the most popular SOAP-RPC implementations that are intensively used in the industry. The study was focused on Apache Axis where we have observed a high susceptibility of software aging. Building on these results we propose a new SLA-oriented software rejuvenation technique that proved to be a simple way to increase the dependability of the SOAP-server, the degree of self-healing and to maintain a sustained level of performance in the applications