How do I know when a reboot is required?

[Fritz Whittington]

On or about 2004-01-14 11:50, Alan Horn whipped out a trusty #2 pencil 
and scribbled:

>On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Steve Gonzales wrote:
>
>  
>
>>The ONLY time I reboot (regularly) is when there is a kernel upgrade.
>>Other than that, I can start/stop/restart services and the server does
>>not complain in the least.
>>    
>>
>
>Keep in mind that unless you're super good about maintaining your system,
>a reboot every few months is often a good thing anyway, it tends to
>highlight hardware issues that often only occur in high stress situations
>such as booting, and services that have been installed and are running but
>aren't set to start on boot (two things off the top of my head)
>
>I would agree that every 2-3 weeks is too often, but once every 4 to 6
>months is probably wise. If this isn't possible then you need to have
>redundant systems IMHO.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Al
>  
>
I also have a problem with letting the *typical* PC system run this long 
without a reboot.  The problem is most PCs don't have ECC memory, they 
don't even have parity-check memory.   And the HW was designed with the 
Windows mentality that you shut your PC down at the end of the day and 
re-boot the next morning, so we don't have to worry about a little 
memory "bit-rot" which might take weeks to show up :-)  
 
Now, if you have a server that needs to run forever and be re-booted as 
little as possible, then if it's so important a resource it should have 
ECC memory and perhaps a hot backup machine.  If it's one of the several 
ultra-cheap workstations I tinker with at home, then I think a weekly 
re-boot is no inconvience and perhaps a good PM. 
 
Besides all that, between new kernel releases and "optimizing" the 
latest kernel to my hardware, I'm lucky to go a day or two between 
re-boots :-D

-- 
Fritz Whittington
I'm using MozTweak addon, and you? MozTweak: http://mozillapl.mozdev.org/

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