Aging-related performance anomalies in the apache storm stream processing system

We address the problem of identifying symptoms and sources of software aging in the Apache Storm event stream processing system; this helps to identify proper strategies to prevent or mitigate anomalous behaviors in production environments. To this aim, we present an experimental study investigating aging manifestations in a popular system, namely Apache Storm. Results show that Storm presents anomalous behaviors in long runs, which prevent some topologies from working continuously. These can be attributed to software aging, due to Storm internal resource management mechanisms influenced by the garbage collector and the memory assigned to worker processes. We discuss the aging-related Apache Storm behaviors, and we experiment rejuvenation actions, showing that they are actually able to remove them.