Server Reboot

[Guest]

Are there any specific recommendations or rules of thumb on how frequently
your should reboot a Windows Server 2000 or 2003 server?

Is it necessary to reboot weekly, monthly, etc?

Is it better to leave them running and not reboot?

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

Don't know that MS has ever recommended periodic reboots not
required by hardware/software installation or to correct problems. MS seems
to concur with general IT admin policy - never reboot a server unless
absolutely necessary:

"A common IT industry term for maximum reliability is "five nines," meaning
that a server is running 99.999 percent of the time. (Which translates into
just under 6 minutes of downtime over a year.)"

See:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evaluation/business/relavail.asp

There are more than few horror stories that begin with something like: "My
server was running fine, but I thought memory usage was a little high so
I decided to reboot ............." Even if there is a sign of trouble, most
admins will try a service restart, run clearmem.exe, etc. before they risk
rebooting a server.

Doug Sherman
MCSE Win2k/NT4.0, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP

 

[Guest]

Hi!

We use 5 terminalservers based on w2000server. windows tends to build up
some trash during operation, some applications are not nicely closed down and
other app do not release all used memory after closing.
Therefore we reboot these servers every night automatically, since there's
no one on them anyway at that time of day.
We think this helps to keep the speed and accuracy. experiments learned that
if we do not reboot them regularly, our servers slow down over time. Think it
depends on the apps, server configuration and the possibility of a reboot.