Re: [cobalt-users] Re: Re: Cobalt Wish List If you must respond to this do it off the board! (CobaltList)

[Kris Dahl <krislists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 5/23/00 5:53 PM, Jeff Lasman at jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Rodolfo Paiz wrote:
> 
>> I keep hearing about those Windows machines that run stable for weeks and
>> months at a time, which you don't have to reboot frequently and which don't
>> crash. Hunted after one for years, even tried to make one or clone one with
>> the best I could get. Never succeeded yet, and never seen one in the wild so
>> far either. Wish it weren't so...
> 
> This thread has now gotten quite offtopic.
> 
> That said, I've got a Windows NT server that runs for months at a time.
> 
> In fact, though I've rebooted it a few times to make sure it wasn't at
> falt in doing what it does (it's a gateway machine between my at-home
> network and my sDSL pipe, and when my sDSL line goes down I do reboot it
> just to make sure), I can't ever remember needing to reboot it.
> 
> It's a 486-100 runnin Windows NT4, SP4.  It's got 256 meg of memory in
> it, and runs only two programs, Winproxy and Mailtraq.

No offense but anyone can get any operating system to stay up for months if
it isn't really doing anything.  Routing is a gimmie, although I am
surprised that you are running NT to accomplish this--I have never been
satisfied with Winproxy, Sygate, to accomplish this task.

About the best I ever got out of any real production server (and I don't use
NT for web servers--purely for workgroup, fileserving, database sometimes,
occasional Exchange server if a client requires it) was about 60-70 days.
However, I find that NT machines start crashing as soon as you turn it
on--ie. it tends to have a nasty memory leak that just gets worse and worse.

That being said, the longest uptime of a production Linux server that I have
had was probably about 300 days.

The average of a NT machine I would say is about 3-4 weeks.  The average of
our linux machines (including Cobalt equipment), in a production environment
is 8-9 weeks or so.

The key to all of it, in my expereince as an NT engineer ( as Jeff's
situation provides backing) is as follows:
* Always use the best hardware (this goes for *any* situation)
* Don't install anything that you don't need (keep it simple, stupid)
* Don't do too much with the machine
* Steer clear of stuff like Exchange
* Have lots of memory
* Don't run any applications on it
* Don't let anyone touch the server
This will equal at least a month uptime under moderate loads, in most
situations.

-k