Analysis of Software Aging in a Blockchain Platform

Abstract

Blockchain platforms have gained popularity in recent years and integrated with other digital technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for multiple-business purposes. Software aging is a common issue in many long-running software systems, but little has been experienced in the context of blockchain platforms. To narrow this gap, this work aims to characterize potential software aging issues in the Cardano blockchain platform that is considered the largest cryptocurrency adopting proof-of-stake. By performing statistical analysis on the measurement data of the Cardano blockchain deployed in two environments with different configurations, we found a symptom of software aging through memory degradation that was confirmed by the Mann-Kendall test. By analyzing the running processes, we identify the cardano-node (the main process of the platform) as the process possibly responsible for such degradation.