In software engineering, software rejuvenation is an approach to help prevent performance degradation and other associated failures related to software aging. This proactive technique was identified as a cost-effective solution during research at the AT&T Bell Laboratories on fault-tolerant software in the 1990s.
There are simple techniques and complex techniques to achieve rejuvenation. The method most individuals are familiar with is the hardware or software reboot. A more technical example would be the web server software Apache's rejuvenation method. Apache implements one form of rejuvenation by killing and recreating processes after serving a certain number of requests. Another technique is to restart virtual machines running in a cloud computing environment.
The IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE) hosted the 5th annual International Workshop on Software Aging and Rejuvenation (woSAR) in 2013. Topics included: