Monitoring Memory-Related Software Aging: An Exploratory Study

The accumulating effects of software aging have direct influence to the rate of aging-related failures. So far, the most investigated software aging effects are memory related, such as memory leak and memory fragmentation problems. In this work, we present a practical body of knowledge to support the solid understanding of the most important issues in monitoring memory-related software aging effects, focusing on memory leak problems. We discuss important drawbacks of using well known system-wide and application-specific aging indicators, as well as propose effective solutions for both cases.