Re: IBM pSeries Shutdown/Reboot - Recommended Frequency

Am 14.10.2010 16:31, schrieb steven_nospam at Yahoo! Canada:
Hi All,

This question has gone around a few times over the years with me
getting a variety of answers from both IBM and non-IBM personnel. Just
want to see what most people are doing nowadays with the latest
servers.

The question was: How often should an IBM pSeries server running AIX 5
or AIX 6 be rebooted? Is there a recommended practice?

Now, having worked with the IBM RS/6000 systems since about 1991, I've
always come down to one answer that I've been given from various
sources over those years: It depends on the applications that are
running on the server and how efficiently coded they are. If the
software is coded right, you may go a long time without needing a
reboot. On the other hand, if there are memory leaks and other issues,
it may require to be done more frequently.

Our company manages something like seventy AIX servers from the old
43Ps up to a new P750 recently purchased. I have seen many a server
run fine for 180+ days and had one system that was not rebooted for
over 500 days. But on the other hand, we've also had servers that
started behaving poorly after about 40 days.

So for our sites, we started implementing a policy of recommending a
reboot sometime after every 1000 hours of use (about 45 days). But
this is not always convenient or followed when you have a production
server that needs to be operational 24/7.

So I ask my extended AIX newsgroup family:
- Do you have any guidelines you follow in your business or department
regarding reboot frequency?
- Is there an official recommendation in a document from IBM anywhere
for pSeries systems running AIX?


Here are the typical setups we have:

SystemA: OLTP, AIX 5.3, no RDBMS, COBOL software using ISAM files.

SystemB: OLTP, AIX 5.3, Informix 11.50, COBOL software.

SystemC: OLTP, AIX 5.3, Oracle 10g, COBOL software


I will be continuing my search at IBM's websites and may even place a
call to them to see what they advise. But it is also nice to hear what
other people are doing, especially if you also have Informix or Oracle
running on the AIX platform.

Thx in advance

SteveN

Hi,

we do never reboot for other reasons than
- forced to by installing new TLs, drivers or other software upgrades
- last(!!!) resort on problems

To my knowledge there is no official recommendation from IBM to reboot your servers. I doubt wou'll find any.

If you got systems behaving poorly after 40 days, find the cause! Implementing a "reboot frequency"-policy is not the way to solve application software problems.

My opinion about 45-days reboot frequency policy as a standard: Not worth to spend 5 minutes effort on such an idea.

Regards,
Uwe Auer



.

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