Managing Performance of Aging Applications Via Synchronized Replica Rejuvenation

We investigate the problem of ensuring and maximizing performance guarantees for applications suffering software aging. Our focus is the optimization of the minimum and average performance of such applications in virtualized and non-virtualized scenario. The key technique is to use a set of simultaneously active application replica and to optimize their rejuvenation schedules. We derive an analytical method for maximizing the minimum "any-time" performance for certain cases and propose a heuristic method for maximization of minimum and average performance for all others. To evaluate our method we perform extensive studies on two applications: aging profiles of Apache Axis 1.3 and the aging data of the TPC-W benchmark instrumented with a memory leak injector. The results show that our approach is a practical way to ensure uninterrupted availability and optimize performance for even strongly aging applications.