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

[Richard Pieri]

Some high performance database engines wire their cache (ex: Caché).  Virtual machine monitors wire portions of the memory that they manage (ex: VMware Fusion, probably VMware Workstation but I don't have it handy to see).  Some Java VMs wire their heap allocations (ex: Java HotSpot VM), which is why I brought it up in the first place.

There's a lot more wired memory in use out there than you suspect, I think.  Few apps wire all of their memory allocations but many wire the slabs critical to performance.

--Rich P.