A Survey of Software Aging and Rejuvenation Studies

Software aging is a phenomenon plaguing many long-running complex software systems, which exhibit performance degradation or an increasing failure rate. Several strategies based on the proactive rejuvenation of the software state have been proposed to counteract software aging and prevent failures. This survey article provides an overview of studies on Software Aging and Rejuvenation (SAR) that have appeared in major journals and conference proceedings, with respect to the statistical approaches that have been used to forecast software aging phenomena and to plan rejuvenation, the kind of systems and aging effects that have been studied, and the techniques that have been proposed to rejuvenate complex software systems. The analysis is useful to identify key results from SAR research, and it is leveraged in this article to highlight trends and open issues.