Service oriented software ageing on Windows and Linux

Software ageing is a continued as well as increasing degradation of the internal state of software throughout its operational life.

Avritzer and Weyuker (1997) reported the software ageing phenomenon during the software reliability analysis. This phenomenon has been reported in continuously running systems where the performance of the software system decreases gradually leading to sudden failure of the system. The main reason for this degradation is the overuse of operating system, data exploitation, etc.

The occurrence of software ageing majorly depends on the resources contained by the system. Kourai and Chiba (2011), Grottke et al (2006) and Garg et al (1998) have observed this occurrence in web server, transaction processing system, etc. This phenomenon is gaining importance due to the emerging economic significance of softwares.

In order to prevent the occurrence of software ageing, Huang et al. (1995) proposed a technique known as software rejuvenation. This technique is defined as the process of taking preventive measures to predict crashes in order to save the data and then the system can be shut down and restarted in a revitalized state.

Thus, software rejuvenation technique was proposed to ensure the reliability of a system, to increase the availability of a system, and to diminish the cost for high maintenance as well as breakdown of a system.

This article discusses the software aging analysis at Windows and Linux Operating System.

Software ageing analysis of Windows Operating System

In order to estimate software ageing on windows operating system, the experiment has been done on Windows 98 and Windows xp operating system. Windows 98 is based on a low specifications hardware system, while Windows XP is based on a high specifications hardware system.

The Windows 98 system has been used to observe a system which is likely to lead to a failure because of the installation of older version software with low hardware specifications. The interpretations from the later system are utilized as an input for the Windows XP system. This is done to generate the method of system monitoring and recording the outcomes of software ageing.

The methodology used for the test sessions in Windows 98 system has been applied in Windows XP system. Again, the average period of every session has been considerably increased.

Software ageing analysis of the Linux Operating System

Linux is being increasingly used in critical situations. In order to estimate software ageing on Linux operating system, an experiment has been done to examine the phenomenon of software ageing within the Linux OS kernel.

The analysis checks the occurrence of ageing sources in the operating system. This is done to statistically check the extent of ageing related bugs affecting the Linux kernel. Then, an extensive examination is done to analyze the impact of using each internal subsystem on ageing trends.

The result of experimental analysis shows that the sources of software ageing actually take place in the Linux kernel. They are exhibited as a statistically critical ageing trend in the experiments performed.

References

• Avritzer, Alberto. (2012), Resilience Assessment and Evaluation of Computing Systems, Springer Science & Business Media.
• Dai, YuanShn. (2007), Advanced Parallel and Distributed Computing, Nova Publishers.
• Avritzer, A and Weyuker, J, E. (1997), “Monitoring smoothly degrading systems for increased dependability,” EmpiricalSoftware Eng.
• Malekpour, A.  (2002), “Advanced Pattern Recognition for Detection of Complex Software Aging in Online Transaction Processing Servers,”  Proc. Conf. Dependable Systems and Networks.
• Koutras,p,v. (2007),  “Software rejuvenation for resource optimization based on explicit approximate inverse preconditioning”, Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation.