HP-UX reboots? Time between them?
I have a ? concerning planned reboots of a HPUX 11.11 (RP7410 machine; 10GB RAM; Oracle 8; BaaN v4c4 ERP). My new boss seems to think that all machines (Wintel & UX) should run 24x7x365 and NEVER ever require a reboot. In the practical world we SysAdmins know that sometimes a reboot for the heck of it improves performance and solves goofy problems caused by application memory leaks, etc. I was wondering if there is any documentation out there, or best practices to determine when to schedule a reboot of UX boxes. Our boxes have been running for 4months w/ zero problems. We're just now experiencing some slowness and are planning a simple reboot. I know that this 4months is much longer than most of our Wintel boxes and we're proud of 4months. Any help/hints/best practices/white papers would be great to show that yes UX machines do need to be rebooted sometimes and that other people in the world cannot run their machines forever. Thanks in advance.

When I got into computers over 10 years ago - it was a once a month reboot - today - not so.

Today I'm part of a team that has 1200 servers - some up for only 40 days - the longest I have seen recently - 877 days. If it doesn't need it, it doesn't need it. Your boss is right - at least for UNIX.

Most of our production HP boxes have been up for 300 days or so. We never reboot them just for the heck of it. I guess that the most common reason to reboot is to install a patch that requires a reboot. I would not agree with a monthly reboot policy.

And a symptom like "some slowness" is not a good reason to reboot. You need to examine the box and find out why it is slow. Note that application memory leaks can be resolved to restarting the application. (Ideally such an application should be fixed.) Do you have a reason to suspect a memory leak? How many page outs is vmstat reporting?

Sometimes a box is wierd and you can't locate the problem and as a last resort, you need to try a reboot. But that should rarely happen and you should have a fairly lengthy list of other stuff that you tried first.

with your gracious help, and help also from ITRC.com we've been able to make a good decision. thanks. Rock On.