Ask HN: How often do you restart your personal machine?

#1

Post by valid_username » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

I only restart when there is some update which requires a restart else I'll put it to sleep or in standby when not using it.

Re: Ask HN: How often do you restart your personal machine?

#2

Post by auslegung » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

Probably once a week on average. Mostly just because I still believe it's good for the machine, not really sure about the science behind that though. 2015 MacBook Pro if it matters.

Re: Ask HN: How often do you restart your personal machine?

#3

Post by capableweb » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:16 PM UTC

When I stop using it, I turn it off. And I need to use it, I turn it on. It's a desktop computer and since it boots in ~1 minute, there is no need for it to be on unless I have something explicit to do on it.

Re: Ask HN: How often do you restart your personal machine?

#4

Post by self » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #3

When I stop using it, I turn it off. And I need to use it, I turn it on. It's a desktop computer and since it boots in ~1 minute, there is no need for it to be on unless I have something explicit to do on it.

I hibernate my desktop, unless there's a kernel update. It doesn't boot up any faster (I have 32 GB of RAM and swap is on a hard drive), but everything is where I left off.

Re: Ask HN: How often do you restart your personal machine?

#5

Post by daly » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

That depends. My Windows machine gets rebooted about once a week, by Microsoft, not by me. Microsoft doesn't value my work.

My Linux machine has been up and running since April 2014.

Re: Ask HN: How often do you restart your personal machine?

#6

Post by topicseed » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

MacBook Pro 15". Probably once every three weeks.

Re: Ask HN: How often do you restart your personal machine?

#7

Post by __d » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:58 PM UTC

Maybe 5 or 6 times a year for my primary laptop.

So it's an old MacBook Pro, and it gets security patches that require a reboot sometimes. I'll usually defer them for a few weeks until I'm in a state where I'm ok to shut everything down.

Other machines, mostly Linux stuff, gets rebooted mostly by accident (ie. power outage). If there's a security patch that requires a reboot, I'm get around to that after a few months. I'd guess most things get rebooted about once a year.

Everything is set to go into sleep / low power mode as much as possible. But I don't like software which isn't capable of running indefinitely.