rebooting UNIX bad for the system?

[JIM DONAHUE]

Why not just reboot (shutdown/restart) the application? It's a lot quicker and should do the same thing. When the application goes down, all of its memory should be released. It also will not affect the hardware in anyway. It's worth trying.

[Keri MacNeil]

Ignoring the reason for the frequent reboots (some good points so far), as far as the hardware is concerned a reboot is non-event since the cards, CPU, memory, etc. still sees essentially uninterrupted voltages coming down the line.

What's hard on the system is when you turn off the systems and repower. This is especially hard on disk drives, especially if they've had a chance to cool down. When you reapply power to the components the surge in power applies the most stress.

[Todd McDaniel_1]

Ken,

My 2cp here.

My application folks have settled on a 1/month reboot. I have Superdome/2 Keystones/8 N-4000s.

I reboot all boxes 1/month at the behest of the App/DBA folks. Not b/c of any problemsm with the OS or memory, but b/c we have several 3rd party apps on my boxes. And this helps clear up zombies and glitches that can arise from these apps.

[Uwe Zessin]

Rebooting a system is bad for the uptime ;-)

Some system administrators are in competition and want to find out who has the highest one.

I admit that I once was in this league, too and refused to reboot, when my boss asked me to get rid of the accumulated statistics of some long-running processes.

A scheduled reboot now and then is a good thing when you have made any changes to the system and want to find out if it still comes up properly. An unscheduled boot (due to a crash or power cycle) can 'suddenly' reveal a problem and many shops don't have 24/7 coverage of the admin.

[Todd McDaniel_1]

Scheduled Reboots > UNScheduled Reboots...

I'd rather pick the time for the reboot than my boxes pick it.


Nuff said. :D