Software aging, also called smooth degradation or chronics, has been observed in a long running software application, accompanied by performance degradation, hang/crash failures or both. The key for software aging problem is how to fast and accurately detect software aging occurrence, which is a hard work due to the long delay before aging appearance. In this paper, two problems about software aging prediction are solved, which are how to accurately find proper running software system variables to represent system state and how to predict software aging state in a running software system with a minor error rate. Firstly, the authors use proposed stepwise forward selection algorithm and stepwise backward selection algorithm to find a proper subset of variables set. Secondly, a classification algorithm is used to model software aging process. Lastly, t-test with k-fold cross validation is used to compare performance of two classification algorithms. In the experiments, the authors find that their proposed method is an efficient way to forecast software aging problems in advance.
An algorithm for tolerating crash failures in distributed systems
