How often to restart 2003 Server

[johne417]

Just curious as to what the best practices are for how often to restart a 2003 server. I know MS has been getting better...

The particular server in question is a good dual-xenon, 4GB RAM database server. It gets hit pretty heavily almost all day long.

Weekly restarts, Monthly restarts, or only when there's a definitive reason? What do you guys think?

Thanks in advance.

 

[bofhrevenge2]

I've found that patches are what dictates the reebooting of my servers these days, 2003 seems to need reebooting far less than NT4 or 2000.

"Horsey to king bish three

 

[mrdenny]

I'd have to agree with that. When a patch requires a reboot, or there is some other definitive reason to reboot.

If you need to schedule a regular reboot then something is wrong with an app on the server.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com

(My very old site)

 

[bofhrevenge2]

Having said that a nice new feature is now available to reduce this problem. To make updates more fluid, Microsoft is offering a Hot Patching feature in Service Pack 1 that allows customers to apply updates to drivers, APIs (define) or any non-kernel level component of Windows Server 2003 without restarting the computer.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/servicepack/overview.mspx

"Horsey to king bish three