Best practice for production servers: To reboot or not to reboot?

[Jerry Feldman]

On 09/14/2010 03:45 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
> In any event, as Jerry pointed out, application memory leaks don't
> require a reboot to fix; they just require restarting the application.
> That will also solve any real or imagined performance degredation
> caused by memory fragmentation, since all of the associated blocks
> will be freed, and (if there's any significant pressure on memory)
> immediately reused.
>  =20
Additionally, modern systems do not have memory fragmentation issues.
The only memory degradation issues with respect to Unix and Linux
systems is swapping, and that is when you are exceeding physical memory.
Even in cases where a daemon has a memory leak, those pages would be
swapped out once, but never need to be swapped back in, so the amount of
degradation caused by a daemon memory leak is going to be minimal. The
real degradation is when you are actively swapping in and out, and the
solution is not simply to reboot, it is to replan what you have running
on that server.

--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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