Self Tuning Memory Management

The WanderWare system incorporates self tuning memory management. These memory management mechanisms ensure that the memory usage of the system does not negatively impact the performance of other critical server processes. This feature is especially important during high stress situations likely to be encountered during automated attacks.

A system lacking in such automated memory management is subject to denial of service attacks based upon causing memory consumption. Attacker(s) simply send enough requests to cause the system to consume huge amounts of memory.

At some point, the server's physical memory will be exhausted and it will be forced to start paging memory to disk. When a system is paging rapidly, it is known as disk thrashing. This causes system response times to degrade by several orders of magnitude.

Finally, when all physical memory and virtual memory limits are reached, the system will likely crash.

By monitoring and tuning it's memory usage dynamically, WanderWare is immune to attacks based on memory exhaustion. As with the tarpit defense, this advanced feature can be the difference between surviving and succumbing to an attack.