On 22/06/2019 19:52, cho...@jtan.com wrote:
> Lyndon Nerenberg writes:
>> We are looking forward to that. *However*, there is a lot to be
>> said for regularly re-installing your hosts from scratch. This
>> ensures your installer scripts don't rot as host system "features"
>> accrete over time. This is prone to happen when you Ansible- or
>
> Or as I like to put it: Reboot* often, to ensure that you can. Uptime is
> overrated.
In my experience, there are indeed benefits to rebooting production
servers on a scheduled maintenance basis.
If long-running processes are running then there is some chance that the
system is suffering memory fragmentation. This will make your server
slower. I think it could also/either trigger an OOM.
Untested changes could have been deployed since last reboot. They might
have unpredictable side-effects on the startup scripts.
Some benefits of a regular, scheduled reboot cycle:d
1. Rebooting will clear up memory fragmentation.
2. Rebooting will improve confidence that it is possible to reboot the
server and in a clean way and improve confidence that the startup
scripts still work. After initial boot it will progress to its intended
runtime state. ("Have you tried turning it off and then back on again?")
This is particularly important in a situation where a server
crashes, needs unscheduled maintenance, or you need to decide whether it
is safe to reboot
(A thought just occurred to me that the following reasons might be a
part of chaos engineering, which I have been meaning to investigate but
haven't found time yet.)
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