A Comparative Evaluation of Software Rejuvenation Strategies

In this paper we present an experimental comparative study of most of the rejuvenation techniques developed so far, divided into two groups: i) simple approaches: physical node reboot (switch off/on), VM reboot, OS reboot and standalone application restart, and ii) sophisticated methods: OS fast reboot, and application restart with hot standby mode. In our experiments we evaluate the availability and performance overheads incurred by software rejuvenation. We also analyze the selected rejuvenation techniques efficiency to mitigate the aging effects. We inject memory leaks at application level to simulate the aging effects. The results show that the availability and performance overheads introduced by the rejuvenation strategies are specific to the granularity level.