Iptables – When Are Bytes Counters Cleared

I don't know about "Ubuntu", but in Linux generally, "iptables" isn't a service - it's a command to manipulate the netfilter kernel firewall. You can "disable" (or stop) the firewall by setting the default policies on all standard chains to "ACCEPT", and flushing the rules.

iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -F

(You may need to flush other tables, too, such as "nat", if you've used them)

The following article on the Ubuntu website describes setting up iptables for use with NetworkManager: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo

That depends on your distribution. On some system, it's deleted only when booted, others have cronjobs running deleting items older than n hours.

• On Ubuntu 14: using tmpreaper which gets called by /etc/cron.daily, configured via /etc/default/rcS and /etc/tmpreaper.conf. (Credits to this answer).
• On Ubuntu 16: using tmpfiles.d. (Credits to this answer).
• On other Debian-like systems: on boot (the rules are defined in /etc/default/rcS).
• On RedHat-like systems: by age (RHEL6 it was /etc/cron.daily/tmpwatch ; RHEL7/RHEL8 and RedHat-like with systemd it's configured in /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/tmp.conf, called by systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service).
• On Gentoo /etc/conf.d/bootmisc.