An Experimental Study of Software Aging and Rejuvenation in Dockerd

Virtualized containers are being extensively used to host applications as they substantially reduce the overhead caused by conventional virtualization techniques. Therefore, as containers adoption grows, the need for dependability also increases. Dockerd, the process that is in charge of Docker containers management, is supposed to support long-running systems, which makes it prone to the well-known problem of software aging. This paper presents an experimental study of software aging and rejuvenation targeting the dockerd daemon. We used the SWARE approach to conduct the experimentation, which encompasses three phases: i) stress - stress environment with the accelerated workload to induce bugs activation; ii) wait - stop the workload submission to observe possible accumulated effects and; iii) rejuvenation - submit a rejuvenation action to perceive changes in the internal software state. The experiment runs for 26 days, and results show that dockerd suffers from software aging effects after the stress phase. The accumulated effects remain in the system until a complete cleanup, comprising removing all the containers and rebooting the operating system.