Periodically rebooting servers

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Server maintenance
Server management
Should servers periodically be powered off and then be rebooted independent of any symptom of a problem? Jim4522
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All computer systems should be shut down and rebooted from time to time. Applications have memory leaks, no software is perfect, you have to take some measures to prevent overloading and even hardware level degradation. If you have updates to do or snapshots to take, you could shut load the updates, and reboot the systems. Depending on how many servers you have, it might take a while, so make sure to notify employees in use of the system of the planned outtages.

Hope this helps!

-Schmidtw

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I’ve gone months without rebooting servers. Pretty much if they need to be patched and the patch requires that they are rebooted then I’ll reboot them. If the system isn’t showing any problems, and the memory isn’t being chewed up for no reason, then there isn’t a memory leak that I need to worry about.

I’ve had systems which were so critical that we couldn’t afford to patch them for 6-9 months and they kept running just fine.

These were Windows servers.

mrdenny.

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  • Buddyfarr
    I agree with Mr. Denny. I worked on a MicroVax II system at the University of Notre Dame that was running for 3 years without reboot. The only reason we took it down was to upgrade to a newer processor. Unless you are experiencing problems, need to patch or are upgrading/moving the servers you should not have to reboot. The idea is to get as close to 100% uptime for your users as you can.
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  • Pressler2904
    While I agree that servers as a rule should be restarted / bounced no more than is absolutely necessary, be aware that there are environments where this just cannot be avoided. My current environment has a Citrix farm accessing an Oracle/BSD database (hey, I inherited it: don't blame me...). If the citrix servers are not rebooted DAILY, within 48 - 72 hours of uptime (possibly less) the print function fails. I've also worked in environments where servers were rebooted every 30 days, just because... and environments where (AIX and Netware) servers ran forever, unless hardware or software upgrades were required. Bottom line, every environment is different. If you start seeing strange behavior, consider a reboot...
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