OSX and restarting

Charon

Over The Hills & Far Away
OK.. Very short question
I'm thinking of updating my iMac (9.2.1) to OSX, because it is said, that you don't have to ever restart your computer again. Is this true? I mean that so they say in Apple, but you -users- who use that OS daily, is it really so?

This OS9 collapses a couple of times a day, and thats why i'm thinking of that updating. Of course i'm gonna buy some more memory too. But I'm sure that 400MHz iMac should run this OSX. With 256MB of ram.
 
I have not restarted OSX in over a year. Applications still crash, but I do not have to restart the whole computer
 
well, you will have to restart from time to time - like after updates and installation of some software. There are also the occasional crashes but nothing like in os 9. You imac is like mine so i can verify that it will run nicely on it. 256 will do the job but 512 or more will do it better. I average around 350 worth of use with 3 or 4 apps open at once. I wish i had a full gig. Memory is a big factor with osx. Also be sure your memory is good - the most common problem with osx is kernal panics caused by incompatible memory.

Overall you should be very pleased. Keep in mind that your classic apps will crash just like they do in os 9 and you will have to reboot classic - but not your whole mac-chine.
 
sounds nice... I better go to local shop and buy some memory... I hate restarting my computer all the time, because of the explorer...
 
But what bothers me is when you're computer has crashed (in mac os X), and you restart it, the "You're computer hasn't shut down properly, you're harddisc is now going to be checked....blabla"-sentence doesn't show up anymore!! It checks the computer for any problems, after it had crashed and you've restarted it, while the anoying Smiley Computer (the first thing that you see when you start up your computer) stands there.. --> SO you can't Cancel it!! Normaly you could click: Cancel and after that: Continue, But now you have to wait about 1 minute for that Smiley Computer to disappear. It reminds me to the OS's before 8.6 (i think), hated that time..

hope you can understand my explaination.



senne.
 
it doesn't show, but MacOS X is doing a disk scan (very important), unlike MacOS 8.5 to 9.x where you can cancel the disk scan (and repair)

and unlike pre 8.5 where it wouldn't do any scan.
(if your computer had a delay after crashing with pre 8.5, it wasn't caused by it doing a disk scan... )
 
Not so! FreeBSD UNIX can run indefinitely if not disturbed. My only reason for ever restarting OS X is CERTAIN companies' (*cough*Apple*cough*) tendancey to write reboot scripts into the end of their packages (.pkg files). I COULD force quit them and go on, but, coming from Apple, they just MIGHT be updating the microkernel, under which condition it's best, but not manditory, to restart FreeBSD. Many low-volume UNIX servers are never updated in any way and stay running throughout their lives; busier boxes tend to be rebooted every week by over-watchful system administrators, but a year of uptime is nowhere near impossible. For example, the AIX 4.1.3 box I used to administer was rebooted once in six months.
 
cheney.. not touche... nummi is full of crap.

while it is entirely possible to get a year of uptime or more out of this OS when it will be mature, this early in the game (just over 1 year, including the awful 10.0.x days!) it just hasn't happened yet.
 
I used to work with a company who hosted their own site on a cluster of BSD machines.. The only time they ever shut one down was because it had a faulty harddrive.. The highest uptime they have now is on one of their mySQL machines.. It's been up for 18 months and 23 days..

No doubt, if you leave the system fairly untouched you'll never need to reboot.
 
I sure that a UNIX machine could be left on for 5 years and never have to be rebooted -- they're not trying to determine whether or not UNIX will stay up that long -- they're saying that nummi is lying when he says his OS X machine has had an uptime of a year or more, because OS X has only been out for a year or more... that must mean he's stayed with OS X 10.0, because the 10.0.X and 10.X updates require a restart, effectively resetting the uptime to 0 upon installation of one of those.

Uptime needs to be calculated without restarts. If you restart, you start back at an uptime of 0, and you can't really say, "Well, I've had an uptime of 6 months with only 2 restarts," because you can't really say for sure if you would have crashed or not without those restarts.
 
EVERYONE: go to your command-line interface, type

uptime

at the prompt, and hit return. Post UNEDITED screenshots in this thread if you can; if you're dumb like me, just paste the text. Here's mine from this morning (mine IS edited to protect my IP address and username):

Welcome to Darwin!
[msp-**-***-**:~] [username]% uptime
8:06AM up 52 mins, 2 users, load averages: 1.68, 2.31, 2.04
[msp-**-***-**:~] [username]%

C'mon, EVERYONE!
 
Welcome to Darwin!
[localhost:~] jhoppe% uptime
8:19AM up 45 mins, 2 users, load averages: 1.63, 1.34, 1.14
[localhost:~] jhoppe%

I shut down every night, start up every morning. My computer never sees more than 8-9 hours of uptime, since I work an 8-9 hour day.
 
Agreed... I manage a Windows 2000-based network and a pair of SQL servers which never see the outside world except through a webserver .asp connection are running uptimes of close to 4 months the last time I checked. Believe me, Windows 2000 is steady as a rock provided you minimize interaction with the system...

My current uptime on my G4 at home:
-
Welcome to Darwin!
[g4_500:~] user% uptime
11:25PM up 6 days, 13:42, 5 users, load averages: 0.10, 0.01, 0.00
[g4_500:~] user%
-
On my G4 at work, I had an uptime streak of 49 days + a few hours before I had to shut down to install a second hard drive for web testing purposes...

Cheers.
-
Originally posted by didde
I used to work with a company who hosted their own site on a cluster of BSD machines.. The only time they ever shut one down was because it had a faulty harddrive.. The highest uptime they have now is on one of their mySQL machines.. It's been up for 18 months and 23 days..

No doubt, if you leave the system fairly untouched you'll never need to reboot.
 
Originally posted by chenly
Not so! FreeBSD UNIX can run indefinitely if not disturbed. My only reason for ever restarting OS X is CERTAIN companies' (*cough*Apple*cough*) tendancey to write reboot scripts into the end of their packages (.pkg files). I COULD force quit them and go on, but, coming from Apple, they just MIGHT be updating the microkernel, under which condition it's best, but not manditory, to restart FreeBSD. Many low-volume UNIX servers are never updated in any way and stay running throughout their lives; busier boxes tend to be rebooted every week by over-watchful system administrators, but a year of uptime is nowhere near impossible. For example, the AIX 4.1.3 box I used to administer was rebooted once in six months.

Yeah, with my experience, if something tells you to reboot, let it. More often than not, it has a reason.
 
My gripe is that, for almost ALL UNIX installations, rebooting is unnecessary. I've noticed that a lot of Carbonized installations force a reboot, which I do, because MAYBE they really need it, but most of it seems to be laziness on the part of programmers who just write in a reboot request at the end of the installer for folks [still] using OS 9.
 
Originally posted by chenly
My gripe is that, for almost ALL UNIX installations, rebooting is unnecessary. I've noticed that a lot of Carbonized installations force a reboot, which I do, because MAYBE they really need it, but most of it seems to be laziness on the part of programmers who just write in a reboot request at the end of the installer for folks [still] using OS 9.

Huh? A lazy programmer actually writing in MORE lines of code than what's required? That sounds a bit unlikely... lazy programmers would write as few lines of code as possible, not MORE than is really needed.

I firmly believe that the reboots are pretty damn necessary -- maybe we don't actually need to reboot and our systems will continue to chug along flawlessly, but what's the big deal? UNIX doesn't require a restart. UNIX installations sometimes require a restart. In my experience, the only people griping about a restart are the ones who type "uptime" in their terminal every 20 minutes just to gloat about the 43.7 days their system's been running without a restart. Big deal. And WHAT kind of productive thing can you do with this so-called uncrashable system? People forget that a computer is a tool... not an entity that seemingly "dies" with a restart. This ain't a DigiPet, people...

Look at the iTunes installer: it requires a reboot because Apple wants the "iTunesHelper" that was placed in your startup items to load. That's why iTunes wants to reboot. Not all reboots are required because the installer went mucking around with the ultramicronanokernel or something.
 
Originally posted by ElDiabloConCaca

Look at the iTunes installer: it requires a reboot because Apple wants the "iTunesHelper" that was placed in your startup items to load. That's why iTunes wants to reboot. Not all reboots are required because the installer went mucking around with the ultramicronanokernel or something.


BUT the iTunes installer could have been written to not require a restart because there is a way to unload the old kernel extension and load the new one without restarting the system.

I agree that yes, some system updates will require a reboot, but not necessarily all of them will.
 
Yes, but they only want the iTunes helper to start on bootup because they make you restart to load the new version of the kernel extension that they updated.
 
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