Analysis and application of conditional software rejuvenation — A new approach

Software aging effects if left uncontrolled are known to cause availability issues. When an application is serving live in production, fixing such issues is close to impossible. Software rejuvenation techniques can be used effectively to avoid failure, but will incur some downtime if a single instance of the application is running. With two instances the system can be engineered in such a way that there is at least one instance running at any time. There may be further reduction in operating expenses if an intelligent program can take charge of executing rejuvenation tasks as required. This paper describes the implementation of such closed loop software rejuvenation in a real world application and the resulting improvement in availability thereof.