Live data from Hacker News

Have you restarted your computer this week?

taonaw.com

71–80 of 411 posts

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#71
post #20

A couple of years ago I noticed that my mac starts collecting weird little bugs if I don’t reboot for a really long time. The cursor starts misbehaving (it won’t reliably change over links, or in graphic editors), switching between apps might take a few seconds, and once I had my keyboard input latency increased by ~500-700ms for every keystroke. These issues go away on reboot. I’m trying rebooting once a week or so…

does logging out fix it?

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#75
post #17

I don't have any data to prove it but I think Mac users don't bother "cleaning up" after they are done with their computers. I think windows and Linux users usually shut down their laptops when they are done. I believe this is because of how Mac is designed, nothing really closes. You close an app and it's just "minimized". Same behavior as with the lid, you close the lid and it suspends. If I recall correctly, at so…

> I believe this is because of how Mac is designed Yes, that they actually got sleep working properly.

I still remember reaching into my backpack to retrieve my Macbook in sleep mode only to find it hot to the touch, having woken up for some goddamn stupid reason. We had "proper" sleep decades ago: we called it "hibernate". Modern "smart sleep" is a technological regression, and Apple is as big an offender as any.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#77
post #39

I remember when Linux users were practically obsessive about uptime and restarting felt like a sign of failure. This was at a time when Windows seemingly needed to restart once or twice a day, at least. These days I like to turn my work Mac off at the end of the week just so I feel a literal sense of closure. It's not really the applications minimizing and running in the background; it's ME.

Yes, I remember feeling pride in the stability of my systems when I saw a large uptime. I had a server that had 1000 days of uptime, once. Now when I see a large uptime, I'm terrified of what security patches the kernel may be missing!

I still remember the days of servers as pets, rather than cattle, and I was harping about server uptime. A wizened server admin piped in and said he rebooted his servers once a week. Said, if you do it any less frequently, then the odds of catching an error causing change while the person who made said change (possibly himself) is still around and can remember what they did go down precipitously. So, to avoid headaches and potential downtime when it mattered, he would just take servers out of rotation and reboot them, and make sure they came back online.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#78
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe this is because of how Mac is designed Yes, that they actually got sleep working properly.

What's the point of sleeping your computer? If you are not using it then it's better to just turn it off

If you turn it off, it might attempt a 45 minute update when you start it again (yes this has happened to me with macos).

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#79

I remember when Linux users were practically obsessive about uptime and restarting felt like a sign of failure. This was at a time when Windows seemingly needed to restart once or twice a day, at least. These days I like to turn my work Mac off at the end of the week just so I feel a literal sense of closure. It's not really the applications minimizing and running in the background; it's ME.

Ahem... yeah... "were"... I do actually reboot occasionally these days, because the world is so serious now.

As a rule, if you don't reboot your servers while you are near them watching for problems, they will reboot by themselves at 3am in the first day you get sick or are traveling.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#80
post #39

I remember when Linux users were practically obsessive about uptime and restarting felt like a sign of failure. This was at a time when Windows seemingly needed to restart once or twice a day, at least. These days I like to turn my work Mac off at the end of the week just so I feel a literal sense of closure. It's not really the applications minimizing and running in the background; it's ME.

Yes, I remember feeling pride in the stability of my systems when I saw a large uptime. I had a server that had 1000 days of uptime, once. Now when I see a large uptime, I'm terrified of what security patches the kernel may be missing!

Live Kernel Patching has been around for about 20 years[-1] now.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux[1] and Oracle (Enterprise Linux) Unbreakable Linux[2] both use it as a selling point.

This feature is still a bit ad hoc because, in most setups, rebooting a system isn't a huge burden and is much simpler than using boutique commands to live-patch it.

[-1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice

[0] https://www.ksplice.com/

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/linux/what-is-linux-kernel-...

[2] https://docs.oracle.com/en/learn/ol-ksplice/

Post reply on HN