This paper considers a transaction-based multi-server system with rejuvenation, and derive the optimal software rejuvenation policies under some system dependability measures; the steady-state availability, the probability of transaction loss and the upper bound of mean response time on transactions. We compare the system configuration based on a single-server with that based on a multi-server in terms of the software rejuvenation scheme. In numerical examples, we calculate the optimal software rejuvenation timing and its associated dependability measure, and refer to the effect of preventive maintenance in the transaction-based multi-server software systems.

Long running software systems are known to experience an aging phenomenon called software aging, one in which the accumulation of errors during the execution of software leads to performance degradation and eventually results in failure. To counteract this phenomenon a proactive fault management approach, called software rejuvenation, is particularly useful. It essentially involves gracefully terminating an application or a system and restarting it in a clean internal state. In this paper, we evaluate dependability performance of a communication network system with the software rejuvenation under the assumption that the requests arrive according to a Markov modulated Poisson process (MMPP). Three dependability measures, steady-state availability, loss probability of requests and mean response time on tasks, are derived through the hidden Markovian analysis based on the time-based software rejuvenation scheme. In numerical examples, we investigate the sensitivity of some model parameters to the dependability measures.

The software rejuvenation is one of the most effective preventive maintenance technique for operational software systems with high assurance requirement. In this paper, we propose the workload-based software rejuvenation scheme for a server type of software system, and develop stochastic models to determine the optimal software rejuvenation schedules for some dependability measures. In numerical examples, we evaluate quantitatively the performance of workload-based software rejuvenation scheme and compare it with the time-based rejuvenation scheme.