Post a screenshot of your longest running Linux desktop or server. Tell us what it is and why it’s been up that long.
Hopefully this also servers as a reminder for us on a Linux box or VM that probably should have been updated and rebooted a while ago.
690, is long but I’ve seen much longer. It’s rarely a number to be proud of, but often a good sign of the underlying distro’s stability if in active use.
This screenshot is from a sandbox server used by several devs or staging/testing a web app. It’s rsync’d nightly. Really not updated often because it’s largely locked down from the web.
AlmaLinux I find to be a good fit for this due to their long EOL (May 31, 2029), stability, and version 8 means very few pending updates after long periods of uptime.
Edit: When the uptime is long and there’s some opportunistic swap usage, sometimes it’s nice to see what’s stored in swap:
servers are rebooted every 7 days.
Pavlos, only because I haven’t studied this, is there a need for periodic reboot to defragment the memory, or is that a critical piece of logic which already takes place within the Kernel?
No, the kernel takes care of it.
Linux memory defragmentation is managed through a kernel feature called compaction.
You guys win! I don’t keep my laptops on; I turn them off when I’m not using them. Workstations in the office however were a different thing; same with the servers. Only a new release of software, disruptive weather or things like that would interrupt uptime, though sometimes installing a new release only affected system up time, the hardware remained turned on and usable. Some “clustered” hardware/software combinations allowed splitting the cluster temporarily, installing an update on one end, then flipping to the other cluster member(s) until they are all installed; that’s another way to keep 24x7x365 services running, and if you have multiple instances like this in multiple locations in an enterprise, it’s how you achieve high availability; financial service companies strive for as close to 100% availability as possible. One firm I worked for even had duplication multiple times in the US and more on another continent, also replicated there! Expensive, yes, so were their services but they were superb!
