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

[Richard Pieri]

On Sep 15, 2010, at 11:47 AM, Derek Martin wrote:
> 
> [It's possible that a number-crunching application which is both
> memory- and cpu-intensive will see a small measurable degredation as
> the kernel has to work a little harder to find RAM for it to do its
> job, even without paging to disk... but you're not likely to notice
> this unless you were already looking very closely -- and these were
> not the sort of apps you were talking about running on your servers.]

You forgot low latency systems.  My previous gig was such a shop, where memory fragmentation would eventually cause a performance hit that would have a measurable impact on the business.  Applications are shut down and restarted weekly, with servers being rebooted monthly, to ensure that fragmentation issues do not become problems -- where "problems" are measured in tens of thousands of dollars or more.

--Rich P.