Memory leak analysis of mission-critical middleware

Memory leaks are recognized to be one of the major causes of memory exhaustion problems in complex software systems. This paper proposes a practical approach to detect aging phenomena caused by memory leaks in distributed objects Off-The-Shelf middleware, which are commonly used to develop critical applications. The approach, which is validated on a real-world case study from the Air Traffic Control domain, defines algorithms and ad hoc support tools to perform data filtering and to find the best trade off between experimentation time and statistical accuracy of aging trend estimates. Experiments show that fixing memory leaks is not always the key to solve memory exhaustion problems.