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by smallerdemon
1085 days ago
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As dumb as it always comes across, telling people to reboot their systems after nearly 25 years in IT support is something we're still doing to this day. And we're still doing it because it works more often than not when someone is calling about performance problems. Why? It's not unusual to see uptime numbers in the 300s or longer for some people. We all have that story. One was someone I work with telling my his laptop was interminably slow and unusable and wondering what he could do to fix it. First question: "How often do you restart it?" Him: "What do you mean?" Me: "You know, turn it off and back on, or just select restart." Him: "Oh, I've never done that ?" Me: "Hm. How long have you had it?" Him: "Four years." Four years without a reboot. The next week when I saw him and asked him if restarting it helped: "Yes! It's running like new again!" My analogy for this is simple: Do you clean your house? Yes. Do you do it intentionally? Like, you know, set out to do it? Or does it just 'happen' passively without you doing anything at all? (Paying someone else to do it not withstanding.) Most people actively, intentionally clean. But you know what they don't do? Actively, intentionally get it dirty. Getting dirty is a passive action of living; of just existing and functioning. It's the same for your computer. Using it causes clutter that a reboot will clean up. But you have to do the reboot intentionally. |
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Do you mean 300 days? Which consumer OS allows you to skip any reboot for that long?
In practice IIRC macOS and Windows basically force you to do it regularly, with users frequently complaining about this (although they got better at saving and restoring state I think?). Some Linux distributions also ask you to reboot into an updated kernel once it's available, for security reasons.
So I'm a bit surprised that a user would end up with such a long uptime without doing it on purpose.