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To Sleep Or Not To Sleep?

O

OCOTILLO

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 25, 2005
219
0
Houston, TX
I read on these posts of those who never shut down their computers and in fact brag about how many days their notebook has been on. My question is Why?

What are the advantages (or disavantages) of not shutting down or sleeping.

Are there technical reasons?

I have had computers for over 20 years and have always shut down the system at night or when away from the computer for extended periods. I have not had any problems resulting from this practice.
 
Apparently macs go on overnight janitor duty cleaning things up and chcking on the overall health of your computer, but i would also like to know more about this as i always switch my computer off at night mainly due to the fact that its tooo noisy to sleep near to.

Shadoww
 
Don't confuse sleeping with rebooting - sleeping means that parts of the cpu or other chips are either turned off or in low power state and the HD and monitor are shut down -- the OS image is in "suspended animation" waithing for either you to wake it up or for an interrupt to wake the system to do something. Biggest bonus of sleep is that it reduces your power draw ($) by a huge factor - and resume time is very fast

I use sleep mode - and these days all displays and HDs are designed to use and respond to sleep mode ---- using sleep mode IMHO does not take away from "up time" --- up time is the time between total reboots

The only real importance of up time is that it is ONE indicatator of how stable an OS is --- meaning the OS can handle a lot of activity and keep all of its registers - memory areas - and buffers organized and under control.

If an OS has "issues" - than over time it will eventually need to be rebooted which effectively resets everything --- and then again small micro-errors began to accumulate forcing a reboot or the system crashes.
 
The reason I never put my macs to sleep, and don't shut them down is I don't like waiting for it to start up. Thats like wasting time.
 
fedora said:
The reason I never put my macs to sleep, and don't shut them down is I don't like waiting for it to start up. Thats like wasting time.
Click to expand...
So, I guess "To Sleep Or Not To Sleep" is just a matter of personal preference.
 
i really almost never sleep my ibook

i have the screen saver set to go black after 15 minutes and the hd to stop running when applicable so i can download things while i am sleeping and then 15 mins after it is done downloading and the computer is idle, it goes to sleep

it is a beautiful thing, shake your mouse and there is your OS :p
 
best to leave you mac running (not sleeping) 1 night a week to run its "janitor" processes. (ps did i invent that term?)
I do not shut down unless i am told to (after an update, security thing etc).
I either sleep or lock the screen (available if you open keychain access>preferences and check "show status in menubar" - see screenshots)
If there is a problem a log out/in usually solves it.
 

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bragging about uptime is just a mac phenomen. Having used PC for the last 20 years, can only say that sleep or hibernate on PC laptops are buggy and crash-proned.

One think about my ibook is that the booting of mac osx is slow, so sleep is a very fast alternative to getting t my work. Also, imagine having dashboard and having to boot into the OS everytime u need fast access to dashboard. That just doesn't give. Clearly dashboard is a natural transition from the sleep function of mac. Apple just have to make dashboard faster in its refreshment of data. But I guess that's our internet speed to blame?
 
janitor processes?

Hi all, what are the janitor processes? Where in OS X can you set them up/schedule them? I think the only reason the computer would do them at night is if that was the time you scheduled it to go through them.
 
Personnally i always turn my computers of. I have two at home and three at work that are on when i am there and i always shut them down. How much energy is wasted becasue people are too lazy to turn of or what it instanlty activated when they get there in the morning. I think i read that 5% of the energy use in the US is from compouters that have been left on all night. Imagine all the CO2 that would be saved if we turned them off edpecially in office buildings :eek:
 
Aeronautical said:
Hi all, what are the janitor processes? Where in OS X can you set them up/schedule them? I think the only reason the computer would do them at night is if that was the time you scheduled it to go through them.
Click to expand...

They are the cron tasks that OS X runs to flush out logs etc. Unix runs them early in the morning around 3am. There's a daily, weekly and monthly one. They get run automatically if you reboot too so unless your uptime is months, it's unlikely to do your Mac much harm if it misses them.

You can force them to run by using the Terminal. There is a application called MacJanitor which will run these on demand for you. You can also use something like Cocktail to schedule these for a time when your computer is more likely to be on.
 
barneygumble said:
Personnally i always turn my computers of. I have two at home and three at work that are on when i am there and i always shut them down. How much energy is wasted becasue people are too lazy to turn of or what it instanlty activated when they get there in the morning. I think i read that 5% of the energy use in the US is from compouters that have been left on all night. Imagine all the CO2 that would be saved if we turned them off edpecially in office buildings :eek:
Click to expand...

Your LCD is off. Your HD is off. In sleep mode, pretty much everything is off. The only thing that's still working is RAM and a part of your logic board somewhere. You use more power booting up then you do leaving your computer in sleep mode.

People who talk about "uptime" aren't talking about how long their computer has been left on. They're talking about time between reboots, so these same people who brag about uptime put their computer to sleep as well.

UNIX has an automatic function where it checks files out. Don't know the specifics, but it performs a task daily, one weekly task (the daily task is still performed that day as well), and a bigger monthly task (the daily and weekly tasks are performed as well on that day).

Or you can just go into TERMINAL and paste this into it: sudo periodic daily monthly weekly

You don't "need" MacJanitor to do this, although the graphics are nice, I guess. ;)

Also, update your prebindings: sudo update_prebinding -root / -force
 
Applespider said:
They get run automatically if you reboot too so unless your uptime is months, it's unlikely to do your Mac much harm if it misses them.
Click to expand...

I've just found out, daily scripts run at 3:15am every morning. Weekly scripts every saturday morning at 4.30am and monthly scripts, the first day of every month at 5.30am. I didn't realise they run automatically if you reboot.

Do these scripts still run if you just log out at night or do you have to be logged in?
 
I've yet to get in the habit of sleeping my PowerMac. I just leave it running 24/7, its quiet enough at night for me to sleep. I just turn off my monitor whenever I leave my computer. My iBook is closed and in sleep if I'm not using it however.


I remember when I had my first PC, I would turn it off if I left the room for 30 minutes and be starting the dumb thing up several times a day.
 
EGT said:
Do these scripts still run if you just log out at night or do you have to be logged in?
Click to expand...

The cron jobs will run as long as the machine is on, no one needs to be logged in. Once again get anacron if you want to make sure they run as expected.
 
risc said:
The cron jobs will run as long as the machine is on, no one needs to be logged in. Once again get anacron if you want to make sure they run as expected.
Click to expand...

Not part of the Tiger pride yet.

Pride, Gaggle, herd, school, brood, plague, litter, flock, whatever it is.

Thanks anyway! :p
 
risc said:
The cron jobs will run as long as the machine is on, no one needs to be logged in. Once again get anacron if you want to make sure they run as expected.
Click to expand...

thanks for the anacron tip - this should allow me to be sure that my cron jobs are getting done, even though my powerbook spends most of its idle time asleep. The convenience factor of being able to close the lid and set my pb down wherever I happen to be in my house is huge.
 
I heard that sleeping adds to fragmentation?

Oh well, I either leave my computer running if there are some heavy downloads overnight or sleeping if I'm not doing anything.

I last rebooted on the 10.3.9 update.
 
I find that from cold, my macs can be quite cold and unresponsive - but then after an hour or so of runtime, they're fine. For this reason alone I tend to keep mine on. Plus of course it's just so blissfully easy to simply close the lids on the ibooks and powerbooks!
 
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