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Why does nobody restart their Macs?
- Thread starter PYR0M310N
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The main thing rebooting does of unique value is delete your virtual memory swap files. Building up large swap files slows the Mac down and eats hard disk space. Rebooting will also reclaim any RAM which might have been stranded by memory-leaking applications. I don't know of any other way to do either one.
Meaning?
I shutdown just about every evening (early morning). Coming from the Windows world, it always made sense to do so. Some of my colleagues think this is excessive. Perhaps they are right? However, my machines are ready to go by the time it takes me to get a cup of tea/coffee. I also experience virtually none of the issues many others do. About the only think I leave running is my network infrastructure.
I only restart my Macs for System Updates. If you have any problems, try repairing permissions first before rebooting!
I'm really, really fond of being able to just open the lid of my MBP and carry on where I left off. For that reason, I rarely reboot or power-off. Sleep mode has been wonderfully reliable for me.
Occasionally, things do get futzed up during use. 9.9 times out of 10, it's the Finder having a fit because a network share's disappeared (gawd, I hope Apple FTFF - 'Fix The ***** Finder' in Leopard!) Usually an option-click on the Finder icon and telling it to relaunch does the trick. Very rarely in this situation, an underlying process might get stuck - a judicious log out/back in fixes that.
Occasionally, things do get futzed up during use. 9.9 times out of 10, it's the Finder having a fit because a network share's disappeared (gawd, I hope Apple FTFF - 'Fix The ***** Finder' in Leopard!) Usually an option-click on the Finder icon and telling it to relaunch does the trick. Very rarely in this situation, an underlying process might get stuck - a judicious log out/back in fixes that.
I find you only need to reboot ANY machine (not just macs) if you run baddly written software.
My mac and my windows box have both been on for about 6 days now, and my linux box has been on since i moved it! (which admitidly is only a couple of weeks at this point)
My mac and my windows box have both been on for about 6 days now, and my linux box has been on since i moved it! (which admitidly is only a couple of weeks at this point)
Yeah. Like the Finder
(I kiid!, I kiiiid! Well, kinda)
I'm fighting a long and drawn-out war with my work Dell laptop regarding sleep. Like I say, I'm thoroughly addicted to sleep & instant resume. It's how I think a computer should work. Windows gives me a choice of Hibernate and Sleep. Hibernate takes forever to sleep wake up (the system's got 2GB RAM). Sleep mode wakes up quicker, but Windows insists on resetting the position and resolution of my external monitor, so I have to redo that each morning. Plus, both Hibernate and Sleep still trigger some funky screen repainting that takes a while upon wake, and the system still takes a few moments to actually be up, responsive and stop thrashing the hard disk (no, it's not swap related -- it does it even when there no appreciable swap use when put to sleep).
I shut down my iMac every night; the earth's resources are finite and all that.
For all of you who don't, why not? What work are you going to do in the middle of the night while you are sleeping?
Same here. Even if im downloading something thats gonna take ages I estimate the time it will take and set the Mac to turn itself off once its finished.
I have mate who has his PC on ALL the time. My boss is the same. He went away for 10 days a while back and left his machine on. It bugs the hell out of me. Your wasting energy, shortening the life of your computer and leaving it open to errors that if the machine is not shut down can turn into something worse. It is also open to attacks.
There's a handy utility called Pause on macupdate.com that can automate that - it'll shutdown/sleep/run any applescript you like when Safari's downloads are complete. I use it to sleep my MBP when downloads are done.
Not to mention, if it's a PC, making one hell of a racket!
'Shortening the life' I'm not too sure on. Any well-built machine should be more than capable of running constantly for an extended period. The MTBF's of most components should be well beyond the occasional extended period of uptime.
As for 'leaving open to errors', again, I'd demand that half-decent system should be more than capable of sitting there performing a given task without confusing itself. if an OS or an application has a limited length of time that it can run for, it's not written properly.
There are times when you should really restart your mac every so often. or get a specific program to perform certain functions - such as Cocktail/MacJanitor, or type a few command lines into Terminal. The time in-between starts is up to you: 1 week/2 weeks/3 weeks/1 month etc....
As stated, there is a valid reason such as memory leakage, page file and OS slowdowns.
Unless recent updates have changed the way OSX works, it performs some important (daily/weekly/monthly) maintenance tasks every time you restart and can not do this whilst in sleep mode. They are also scheduled to run during 3-5am when the system, but if you put your macbook/powerbook to sleep during this time, these important tasks are not done.
Have a read here:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html
Cocktail:
http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.html
Morale is; don't be so blase about not restarting your Mac. Whilst they are built to just keep on running, it doesn't hurt to restart or perform the maintenance scripts manually in place. Even if you do that, it still helps to restart every so often - again it won't hurt and will improve OSX.
If you do neither, OSW will slow down and you will loose unnessary HDD space. I also love just putting my PB to sleep, waking it up and continuing as if nothing occured, but I also do restart randomly every few weeks just to make sure OSX is clean(er) and my PB is much happier when I do.
As stated, there is a valid reason such as memory leakage, page file and OS slowdowns.
Unless recent updates have changed the way OSX works, it performs some important (daily/weekly/monthly) maintenance tasks every time you restart and can not do this whilst in sleep mode. They are also scheduled to run during 3-5am when the system, but if you put your macbook/powerbook to sleep during this time, these important tasks are not done.
from MacJanitor site.
Have a read here:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html
Cocktail:
http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.html
Morale is; don't be so blase about not restarting your Mac. Whilst they are built to just keep on running, it doesn't hurt to restart or perform the maintenance scripts manually in place. Even if you do that, it still helps to restart every so often - again it won't hurt and will improve OSX.
If you do neither, OSW will slow down and you will loose unnessary HDD space. I also love just putting my PB to sleep, waking it up and continuing as if nothing occured, but I also do restart randomly every few weeks just to make sure OSX is clean(er) and my PB is much happier when I do.
Whilst the point about memory leaks is understood, if OS X's VM subsystem is doing its job, an application can leak as much as it likes, but the memory will be reclaimed once the application (process) is terminated.
Leaked memory isn't 'unknown' to the system, it's unknown to the application. Or, rather, the app allocates it, but then stops using the object it allocated it for without releasing the memory allocation. It could then proceed to keep allocating memory for an object without releasing it when the object's finished with... lather, rinse, repeat. As far as the OS is concerned the application is still using the address space. You can verify this quite easily... run an application that leaks and watch its memory usage in Activity Monitor. Note that the RAM figure is listed against the leaking process. There's not a magic 'hey, I don't know what app's using this memory!' category. So, when the app is closed, the leaked memory will also be reclaimed.
If a core component of the OS is leaking, I can see how a restart would resolve this. But not your average app.
Page-file wise, my system seems to behave itself. In another thread here, hayne did an excellent job at describing how OS X's VM system determines how and when to delete swap files. My system behaves as it should.
The maintenance scripts are also of minimal benefit in my case. Sure, my logfiles may not get rotated daily or weekly, but if I suddenly find myself out of disk space, a quick manual launch of the daily script will sort that out. I'd rather just get launchd to run the scripts at a more suitable time than reboot when I don't want to. The other stuff that the scripts do -- rebuilding the locate command's database, I very, very occasionally do manually if I happen to use locate in a terminal session and notice it's not finding stuff. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've used locate in the past 6 months.
OS slowdowns? Don't get 'em. If an app misbehaves, I kill it. If something related to my session plays up, I log out and back in. There's absolutely nothing critical I'm missing by not deliberately taking the time to reboot. If it's behaving sub-par, a visit to Activity Monitor provides the reason and the solution.
(bear in mind, I have no problem at all about rebooting for an OS update or application installation. I'm not an uptime-measurer. But I do refuse to adjust my usage pattern or hand-hold a modern OS.)
Leaked memory isn't 'unknown' to the system, it's unknown to the application. Or, rather, the app allocates it, but then stops using the object it allocated it for without releasing the memory allocation. It could then proceed to keep allocating memory for an object without releasing it when the object's finished with... lather, rinse, repeat. As far as the OS is concerned the application is still using the address space. You can verify this quite easily... run an application that leaks and watch its memory usage in Activity Monitor. Note that the RAM figure is listed against the leaking process. There's not a magic 'hey, I don't know what app's using this memory!' category. So, when the app is closed, the leaked memory will also be reclaimed.
If a core component of the OS is leaking, I can see how a restart would resolve this. But not your average app.
Page-file wise, my system seems to behave itself. In another thread here, hayne did an excellent job at describing how OS X's VM system determines how and when to delete swap files. My system behaves as it should.
The maintenance scripts are also of minimal benefit in my case. Sure, my logfiles may not get rotated daily or weekly, but if I suddenly find myself out of disk space, a quick manual launch of the daily script will sort that out. I'd rather just get launchd to run the scripts at a more suitable time than reboot when I don't want to. The other stuff that the scripts do -- rebuilding the locate command's database, I very, very occasionally do manually if I happen to use locate in a terminal session and notice it's not finding stuff. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've used locate in the past 6 months.
OS slowdowns? Don't get 'em. If an app misbehaves, I kill it. If something related to my session plays up, I log out and back in. There's absolutely nothing critical I'm missing by not deliberately taking the time to reboot. If it's behaving sub-par, a visit to Activity Monitor provides the reason and the solution.
(bear in mind, I have no problem at all about rebooting for an OS update or application installation. I'm not an uptime-measurer. But I do refuse to adjust my usage pattern or hand-hold a modern OS.)
Handy app but i very rarely need to download over night.
How did you know?
My boss' laptops fans are amazingly loud. When I first started working here I thought he left all the computers on in the studio. Every so often it would go REALLY quiet in studio and I thought power to all the other comps was cutting out. Turns out it was my bosses PC making the racket on its own and the studio goes dead quiet whenever it crashes. I dont mean in any major way here I just mean there is the slight possibility. Being off is better than being on, even if its made to be on right?
How did you know?
Lucky guess
Well, I can hear my boss' Dell D420 (a lil' 12" thing, similar machine to a Macbook) with its fans blasting... behind me is the tornado noise coming from a few PowerEdge servers (the loudest, oddly, being the rackmount server). I tune it out
I dont mean in any major way here I just mean there is the slight possibility. Being off is better than being on, even if its made to be on right?
Hehe. Well, it depends
People also say that the effort of spinning up a hard disk is actually the action most likely to trigger a fault. Purely anecdotally, we had an old *old* unix server which had been running constantly for 5 years or so. It was shut down cleanly one day because we wanted to do an electrical safety test on its AC cable... damn thing wouldn't start back up again...But that's purely anecdotal. I think the long and the short of it is: if your machine is fault-free, leaving it on isn't going to appreciably increase the likelihood of a fault developing. On the other hand, if there's a present weakness, leaving it on could hasten the onset of a problem. I'm of the mind that if my machine has a latent fault, I want to know about it sooner rather than later
Interesting info, thanks. I may be encountering the memory leak issue more than most because I still run applications in Classic, which is not so well behaved.
You should be able to work around that. The Classic environment within which all OS 9 apps run is provided by a single OS X process. If you stop and start Classic (I believe there's a menu extra that provides easy access to this) you should reclaim memory allocated by Classic apps. Note that even after you've closed all Classic apps, the Classic environment is still running (I suppose that Apple assumes that if you've used Classic apps during a session, you'll probably need Classic again). The OS X process which provides the Classic environment is named TruBlueEnvironment, which you can see in Activity Monitor. You should be able to monitor Classic app's combined memory usage by checking the RAM figures for that TruBlueEnvironment process.
Yes, I know. I keep the Classic control on my menu bar and use it to quit Classic sometimes. Classic also goes to sleep after a proscribed period of disuse. Right now my Classic Environment is asleep, and is using 18.6 Mb of real memory and 1.1 Gb of virtual. I currently have six VM swapfiles amounting to 2 Gb (probably mostly from running Photoshop 5.0 in Classic). I'm not sure if I get any of that back simply by quitting Classic.
I notice a some posters love to brag about their "up-time". Their egos seem to need to associate their personal worth with their computer busy-ness.
I'd suggest that such folk might try to get a life; nobody gves a flying ***k about their "up-time"!
Personally, I find that rebooting can clear up some of the sketchiness that creeps up now and then on my Intel machine (better since the 10.4.8 update). (Like when file names start getting garbled in the finder.) For more serious maintenance, Disk Warrior and Cocktail--requiring rebooting.
I'd suggest that such folk might try to get a life; nobody gves a flying ***k about their "up-time"!
Personally, I find that rebooting can clear up some of the sketchiness that creeps up now and then on my Intel machine (better since the 10.4.8 update). (Like when file names start getting garbled in the finder.) For more serious maintenance, Disk Warrior and Cocktail--requiring rebooting.
I don't see what's the big deal with restarting. I mean do it if you need to or skip it and brag about how long your Mac has been up without a reboot. It just seems like a pointless argument when people are going to do what they want anyway. Find something meaningful to talk about...
A couple of points:
Wasting energy, yes. Shortening the life of the computer, very unlikely. In general, power cycling a computer causes much more stress on its components than leaving it on. In particular, every power cycle can shorten the life of the power supply and the disk drives. This is because the computer draws far more power when first turning it on than at any other time. Much of this is spinning up the disk drives, which must draw more power to accelerate the platters, as well as work against the higher coefficient of friction when the platters are initially stationary.
This is a myth that's almost as pervasive as the repair permissions myth. Yes, the maintenance scripts clean up some temporary and log files that accumulate over time, but these are really only minor leftovers from OS X's unix heritage. To claim that not running them will slow anything down or lose a significant amount of hard disk space is simply not true. The average user will not notice any difference in performance or used disk space if these scripts never get run. It is perfectly safe to never run them, and frankly, it's a waste of your time to download and use a program to run them manually. It's purely placebo.
Just for illustration, here's what the daily scripts do:
I would strongly argue that none of the above is even remotely useful to the average user. If it were required, Apple would have figured out a better way to make sure it runs, because they know very well that most people turn off or sleep their computers at night. Actually, I remember reading that Tiger's launchd was supposed to run these sorts of things at the first opportunity after the scheduled time if they weren't able to run when intended. I don't know if this is actually true, as I've never had a need to find out.
In any case, the programs that allow users to run these things manually are completely unnecessary. At best, they are wasting people's time, and at worst, if they're actually charging money, they're ripping people off. It's nothing but a placebo.
Err, sorry about going off on that tangent, but it bugs me sometimes.
Wasting energy, yes. Shortening the life of the computer, very unlikely. In general, power cycling a computer causes much more stress on its components than leaving it on. In particular, every power cycle can shorten the life of the power supply and the disk drives. This is because the computer draws far more power when first turning it on than at any other time. Much of this is spinning up the disk drives, which must draw more power to accelerate the platters, as well as work against the higher coefficient of friction when the platters are initially stationary.
This is a myth that's almost as pervasive as the repair permissions myth. Yes, the maintenance scripts clean up some temporary and log files that accumulate over time, but these are really only minor leftovers from OS X's unix heritage. To claim that not running them will slow anything down or lose a significant amount of hard disk space is simply not true. The average user will not notice any difference in performance or used disk space if these scripts never get run. It is perfectly safe to never run them, and frankly, it's a waste of your time to download and use a program to run them manually. It's purely placebo.
Just for illustration, here's what the daily scripts do:
- Remove files in /Library/Logs/CrashReporter that are older than 60 days. Frankly, I dislike this. If my computer is having a very intermittent crash problem, I want logs to be there as far back as they go. If crashes occur so frequently that this directory becomes huge, you've got much bigger problems to worry about.
- Remove files in /var/rwho older than 7 days. Nobody uses rwho anymore. It's a leftover from the old unix days. I guarantee your /var/rwho directory is empty.
- Remove files older than 3 days in /tmp. Fine, this directory can accumulate a number of files when poorly written programs don't clean up after themselves. Judging from the current state of mine, I accumulate about 8 kilobytes of data per day. That's a mere 28 MB after 10 years. Big deal. Plus, /tmp is completely wiped upon reboot, so in reality it'll only accumulate until the next software update that requires a restart.
- Remove scratch fax files over 7 days old. How many people send faxes with their Macs? I'm sure a few do, but I've never done it and I'll bet most are the same. If you constantly send faxes, this is probably the only one of the bunch that's of even moderate value. I have no idea how big the files are.
- Remove system accounting logs, which are not enabled in OS X client anyway.
- Backup the Netinfo database. This is only useful to system administrators who know about Netinfo, because the backup is not automatically restored in the event of corruption. You really have to be an OS X Netinfo guru to make any use of this whatsoever.
I would strongly argue that none of the above is even remotely useful to the average user. If it were required, Apple would have figured out a better way to make sure it runs, because they know very well that most people turn off or sleep their computers at night. Actually, I remember reading that Tiger's launchd was supposed to run these sorts of things at the first opportunity after the scheduled time if they weren't able to run when intended. I don't know if this is actually true, as I've never had a need to find out.
In any case, the programs that allow users to run these things manually are completely unnecessary. At best, they are wasting people's time, and at worst, if they're actually charging money, they're ripping people off. It's nothing but a placebo.
Err, sorry about going off on that tangent, but it bugs me sometimes.
From what i've heard, the hibernate or sleep (not sure which one, or maybe both
) puts everything thats in the RAM onto the HD so that when it wakes up it puts all of that back onto the RAM. As opposed to apples sleep where items in the RAM are kept there but everything else shut off.Would this be why the HD is "thrashing"?
I allways find that with the PC i have it's the least responsive after its restarted (if you don't include when it crashes
)