In software engineering

Software engineering

Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...

, software aging (in American English

American English

American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

, or software ageing in British English

British English

British English, or English , is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere...

) refers to progressive performance degradation or a sudden hang/crash of a software system due to exhaustion of operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 resources, fragmentation and accumulation of errors. A proactive fault management method to deal with the software aging phenomenon is software rejuvenation. This method can be classified as an environment diversity technique that usually is implemented through software rejuvenation agents (SRA). However, the simplest way to emulate software rejuvenation is to reboot

Reboot

Reboot can refer to:* Rebooting , an event sequence when restarting a computer* ReBoot, a Canadian CGI-animated television series* ReBoot , a video game based on the television series...

 the system or restart the aging application.

Memory leak

Memory leak

A memory leak, in computer science , occurs when a computer program consumes memory but is unable to release it back to the operating system. In object-oriented programming, a memory leak happens when an object is stored in memory but cannot be accessed by the running code...

s are a potential cause or contributoring factor in software aging, as they can exhaust available system memory

Computer memory

In computing, memory refers to the physical devices used to store programs or data on a temporary or permanent basis for use in a computer or other digital electronic device. The term primary memory is used for the information in physical systems which are fast In computing, memory refers to the...

.