I have many Linux servers (SUSE 9 &10) used to run web services that provide data to large calculation grids. Recently we have had some difficult to explain outages (i.e. hardware and software logs are not showing any obvious errors) and we are starting to wonder whether the long uptime (typically 200-300 days) is the issue. Given that these servers are heavily utilised, should I consider a regular reboot cycle?
Linux – How Often Should Linux Servers Be Rebooted?
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Best Answer
You must reboot after a kernel update (unless you are using KSplice), anything else is optional. Personally I reboot on a monthly cycle during a maintenance window to make sure the server and all services come back as expected. This way I can be reasonably certain if I have to do an out of schedule reboot (i.e. critical kernel update) that the system will come back up properly. Automated monitoring of servers and services (i.e. Nagios) also goes a long way to helping this process (reboot, watch the lights go red and then hopefully all back to green).
P.S. if you do reboot regularily you'll want to make sure you tune your fsck checks (i.e. maximal mount count between checks appropriately, otherwise a quick 2 minute reboot might take 30 minutes if the server starts fsck'ing a couple terabytes of data. I typically set my mount count to 0 (tune2fs -c 0) and the interval between checks to 6 months or so and then manually force an fsck every once in a while and reset the count.