Injecting memory leaks to accelerate software failures

A number of studies have reported the phenomenon of "Software aging", caused by resource exhaustion and characterized by progressive software performance degradation. We develop experiments that simulate an on-line bookstore application, following the standard configuration of TPC-W benchmark. We study the application failures caused by memory leaks, using the accelerated life tests method. In our experiments, the memory consumption rate is selected as the acceleration factor, and an IPL-lognormal model is used to estimate the time to failure at each acceleration level. Subsequently, the estimate of the time to failure distribution at normal condition is obtained. Our acceleration experimental results based on the IPL-lognormal model show that it can be used to greatly reduce the cost to obtain the time to failure at normal level, which can be used in scheduling software rejuvenation. Finally, we select the Weibull time to failure distribution at normal level, to be used in a semi-Markov process, to optimize the software rejuvenation trigger interval. © 2011 IEEE.