HP recommended time between reboots for SD32000, Rp7400, RP7410 and RP8400 systems.

[Shane Swartz]

Does HP have a recommended time between reboots for SD32000, RP7400, RP7410 and RP8400 systems? The systems are all running HP-UX 11.11 with mission critical support, etc. I realize that the applications running on the system might dictate different recommendations, but I'm only trying to find out a recommendation based on platform type and OS.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Shane,

NO - these aren't Winblows systems.
With *proper* application coding, ideally one should never *have* to reboot an HP-UX system. We've had systems run for over 2 years w/o reboots. Granted, we fell behind in patch levels, but we never encountered any problems and/or reasons to have to patch.
So my answer would be that NO, the platform type nor HP-UX OS will require reboots, but if one wishes to stay current on patches - these installs will frequently have reboots as a normal course of action.

My 2 cents,
Jeff

[Shane Swartz]

Jeff,

That is what I believed to be the answer, but was looking for verification. I agree that applications are the cause of regular reboots. Thanks for the response.

[Cheryl Griffin]

With unix, we aim for uptime, not downtime.

[Bill Hassell]

Reboots are required because either the operating system or application programs still in beta test (like Windows anything). Unix has been running for 3 decades and for versions like HP-UX, the code was first released in the mid 1980's. As mentioned, a properly patched HP-UX installation will not need rebooting. I ran an HP-UX email server (a 9000/870 for more than 500 users for 6 years without ever needing a reboot. I did schedule downtime for security patches and once to replace a power supply that failed--we didn't notice it for weeks because of hardware redundancy. Note that there are some other Unices that must be rebooted even today. HP-UX isn't one of them.

Application programs can create all sorts of problems due to bad design (shared memory orphans, zombie/defunct processes) so it's best to remove these bad programs and wait for some quality code.