[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk 1.0.9 long term stability <--thread hijack, why not reboot?

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Wednesday 14 September 2005 12:34, Colin Anderson wrote:
> I'm curious as to this obsession with uptime is. All of the posts of this
> type are along the lines of "After X days, Y thing does not work but if I
> reload or reboot, it's OK" - so why not cron a reboot? Is it considered bad
> form or something like that? I reboot every night whether it is needed or
> not, not afraid to admit it, and everything works fine for me.

Rebooting indicates that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.  It 
has nothing to do with uptime wars but with reliability and stability.  I 
don't care if the system's down for 3 minutes due to reboot, I am concerned 
that there is an underlying issue that you're merely masking by rebooting.

> We also do the "Sunday reboot" of all of our Windows servers as well as
> restarting all of the critical services such as IIS , SQL, Exchange etc
> nightly. It helps, a lot (Exchange is a notorious memory leaker)

Exactly.  With closed-source proprietary applications you can't fix the 
problem so this is all you can do.  With Asterisk and OSS you can fix it and 
increase code quality.

Would you accept the need for a weekly reboot of your Nortel Option 11?  How 
about if your car required you to remove the battery for two minutes once a 
month?  Your VCR?  How about a clock radio that had to be unplugged once a 
week to fix weird little issues?

I put Asterisk into the same class as these kinds of devices.  They must be up 
and stay up.  If they need to be rebooted then there's an issue that needs to 
be addressed and corrected.

> I've also heard it said, something along the lines of: "If you have to
> reboot, your server isn't set up correctly" to which I say piffle. Even
> NASA has rebooted the Mars probes after they land and I understand that
> they run VXWorks, incidentally, the same RTOS that my Mitel 3300 uses, and
> *even Mitel* recommends periodic reboots, which we duly cron every night, 2
> AM.

Hmm, I guess I won't be buying any Mitel equipment.  The MARS rovers were 
designed to be totally shut down as a last measure to ensure everything is 
starting up as they'd simulated on Earth and that there was no high-energy 
radiation glitches due to space travel.

-A.