Pros and Cons of Server Rebooting regularly

hello friends,

I want to know what are the pros and cons of rebooting a server frequently....say on weekly basis.
Is it OK or harmful?
Can anyone provide me the necessary information about the same...?

Thanks

Servers often get rebooted for updates, at least in the Windows world. Rebooting for critical kernel updates happens anyway.

However, if you need to reboot a server on a weekly basis, you are rising up the real problem with a server or its software...say,. A memory leak? A bad driver? The solution to these problems are to fix them.

I have came across multiple infrastructure managers that installed a policy of weekly server reboots. As a developer, I was always against the policy - I believe that this is a hack to work around software bugs and hardware instabilities, instead of correcting them.

PROS

>Flushes Cache
>Restarts services
>Clears RAM

CONS

>Potential system wont come back on
>Potentially shortends the life expectancy of the hardware

Database servers cache a lot of information in RAM. When you reboot your server, this cache gets empty and very cold. Assuming you have a typical usage pattern, a cold, empty cache will result in slow performance for users when they attempt their queries after a reboot. It may also increase the time needed to perform some types of maintenance like backups because the disk may need to be accessed more.

Your servers go down! Your maintenance windows for backups and other things get shortened because your server is off for some nonzero period of time. You also may end up having to tell your users that you will have downtime, depending on your systems' architecture.

Assuming you have some sort of notification system for alerting, you will have to configure it to ignore your downtime window. This can mask problems that happen around the time your server reboots, and adds to the amount of configuration you will need to do on your servers.

Snake08,

Not meaning to pry, but do you have any good documentation on the effects of weekly reboots on hardware life expectency or is this from your past experience with Windows servers?

Thanks,
Tom