how often do you reboot your servers?

[Joseph Hoh]

Just wondering how often people reboot their UNIX servers - HP or other?

once a week
once a month
only when needed

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Jeff:

Basically I reboot only for patch installations (if required) and/or for hardware upgrades (obviously).

This question was recently asked with quite a few replies too, in this thread:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0xefba6af52b04d5118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

...JRF...

[Patrick Wallek]

Hmmm.....James is too fast! I was going to post the same link he did. Oh well.

I reboot my servers once a month. I have one weekend a month that I get the machines without any users. That allows me to reboot, load patches, or whatever else is required. It seems to work pretty well.

You will find a lot of different opinions on this. I know of some machines that have been left up for years without a reboot. I just depends on what is running on the machine and how well the code was written.

[Christian Valet_2]

Hi Jeff,

We do have a production server, that is used 24x7. It's
really difficult to get a window that would allow me to reboot the K570. So, we do not reboot the server as per say; only when there are patches that must be applied.

At the previous place I worked, once a month we were
rebooting the server. IT was part of the routine.

Honestly, I don't see any difference. I think it's much a
matter of taste.

Chris

[Joseph Hoh]

Just for the record I choose to reboot only when needed - software install, hardware change, etc. Where I am working there are cronjobs to reboot the systems and sometimes they don't shutdown properlly or come back up and guess who gets called. I am trying to change that policy.

[Dave Wherry]

As others said, it depends. I worked in one shop where we rebooted every Sunday because we had a memory leak in Informix. If we didn't, it would crash on the 10th day. I've also had servers that were up for nearly a year. Only a power failure brought them down.
I'm a fan of not creating extra work. If your servers are running fine, don't mess with them. Leave them up.

[Bruce Regittko_1]

Hi,

I reboot our ingite server only when HP Education sends me a new disk, which is about once every quarter.

My test box under my desk gets reboot about once a quarter for patches or user induced crashes :).

The student machines get booted frequently and every which way imaginable including having the power cored pulled. No ill effects yet (although the OS is reinstalled weekly for new classes).

--Bruce

[Brian Markus]

We've been using a product called MCS, which is a front-end app server. In older releases it had a major memory leak and it would go nuts. I had to reboot every week to maintain the box. I've kept this going even after the fix. It helps my sanity. I have an open window where I can do whatever admin work I need with out having to beg for it. I highly recommend scheduled down time for major production boxes. Not necessarily this frequent. I get a nice clean backup with no users on the system and no apps running. Not all of my boxes have this luxury though. I have one box running 10.20 that has been up for more than a year with no down time.

[Ajitkumar Rane]

I think the general consensus has been


Reboot the server only and only when needed.

[Stefan Schulz]

We don't reboot our servers if we don't have to. And i think nobody needs to reboot a HP-UX server on a regular basis as long as there is no buggy application.

But for any buggy application (like memory leak problems) there should be a patch available one day. So in long term you should be able to elimnate the need of regular reboots.

In my opinion you don't win anithing by rebooting a stable server. But you have the risc that something goes wrong during this procedure.

Regards Stefan

[David Peacock]

We've been told by a consultant to reboot once a month. The consultant says a reboot does a fsck and cleans up log files. A reboot is easier than doing it manually.

He also recommended bringing the system to a halt every six months. This is to test to see
if the disks are healthy

[Bruce Regittko_1]

Hi David,

If your filesystems were unmounted cleanly, then fsck is typically not run when the system boots. If it does, it is usually just a replay of the intent log (for vxfs filesystems). If you really want to run fsck, which is not a bad idea, then boot to runlevel s and run it manually. For vxfs filesystems,

fsck -ofull,nolog /dev/vgXX/rwhatever

--Bruce