Software Aging Analysis of Web Server Using Neural Networks
  Software aging is a phenomenon that refers to progressive performance
degradation or transient failures or even crashes in long running software
systems such as web servers. It mainly occurs due to the deterioration of
operating system resource, fragmentation and numerical error accumulation. A
primitive method to fight against software aging is software rejuvenation.
Software rejuvenation is a proactive fault management technique aimed at
cleaning up the system internal state to prevent the occurrence of more severe
crash failures in the future. It involves occasionally stopping the running
software, cleaning its internal state and restarting it. An optimized schedule
for performing the software rejuvenation has to be derived in advance because a
long running application could not be put down now and then as it may lead to
waste of cost. This paper proposes a method to derive an accurate and optimized
schedule for rejuvenation of a web server (Apache) by using Radial Basis
Function (RBF) based Feed Forward Neural Network, a variant of Artificial
Neural Networks (ANN). Aging indicators are obtained through experimental setup
involving Apache web server and clients, which acts as input to the neural
network model. This method is better than existing ones because usage of RBF
leads to better accuracy and speed in convergence.
