Maintenance Reboot Frequency

[jaballah]

Hi All,
As far as I know, a healthy Solaris 9 machine can stay awake (and running with normal load) for long (more than one year) without a significant performance degrade; but I faced the situation where the following questions need common answers:

Is there a recommendation to reboot a healthy Solaris machine periodically?
If yes, then how often (once a month, once a year ..)?
What are the benifites of this periodic reboot?

Thanks in advance
Jaballah

 

[KenCunningham]

I must admit to being of the 'if it's working, don't fix it' persuasion. Unless there are overriding reasons for a shutdown (patch installation requiring a reboot and the like), I tend to let 'em run. No doubt others will have different strategies (if this option is a 'strategy'!) and will advise accordingly.

Rebooting will clear any defunct processes is you have any, but as these don't tend to take up much if any system resource, it's a pretty flimsy reason IMHO. I'm also of the view that shutting down has the side-effect of putting extra strain on physical system parts like boards and disks, leading to their possible early failure, though again, I have no empirical evidence for this.

All I ask of you
Is make my wildest dreams come true

 

[marrow]

If system is well built, plenty of tmp-space and physical memory, I would leave alone. A reboot would clear out the rubbish and if a system was short of resources then it would be advisable. We had an old system that was losing tmp & memory daily, we ended up having to reboot every 2 months. We doubled the memory from 4MB to 8MB and added another large disk (to increase tmp)and has run for 6 months without interuptions.

I would run "vmstat 2" commands to check you system is looking OK.

 

[kHz]

If you aren't having any problems then don't reboot it. A lot of servers stay up for years with reboots. At my current job there are Solaris servers that have been up for 3 years. Some places have servers with longer uptimes than 3 years.

 

[KenCunningham]

Yup, agreed. My current champion is 834 days and still going strong.

All I ask of you
Is make my wildest dreams come true