pmooney.net

1 - The only Windows Domino server we have is a BlackBerry server. It's only been up for 33 days. I probably agree with you about the 2 month deal. It's probably a good idea for any system!

My production iSeries hasn't been shutdown since November 11, 2005.

Actually, Domino for iSeries support has recommended that iSeries systems be restarted every couple of months to apply fixes. We need to load some on ours.

2 - On moderate servers with moderate usage thats fine, but I still see the need to reboot every 60 days on high end production kit.. I wonder if IBM have a metric for this (although I seriously doubt it).
Don't feel that this is a bad thing. I know other current application servers that have to be rebooted nightly on W32/W64 even! (not domino)

3 - Our servers have only a couple of hundred users each, and we restart them only when applying Windows patches.

4 - Upon further review...

Back in the day, there was a weekly reboot scheduled for our servers when they were on NT4. It ran at around 0300 or so...just the reboot.exe from the NT Resource Kit. There was some instability in the system back then and since it seemed to go away with a weekly reboot, that's all that was done about it.

Eventually, the instability we were experiencing stopped. I'd like to take credit for it, but I can't. But we switched to rebooting as needed since then.

I'll agree with Mrs D on her point about cold booting too. I don't reboot my windows servers unattended anymore. For some reason, in my environment when I scheduled reboots with reboot.exe, SMS would occasionally hang up on the shut down after Domino quit. So I'd get down-server calls the morning after reboot because they didn't shut down all the way. Again, this was in the NT4 days. Haven't tried it in years...our window for scheduled maintenance starts at 1700.

5 - Well, I almost feel obligate to reply. Since Win2003 I've noticed an increase in Win/Domino stability. I have one server running inbound/outbound SMTP, HTTP and hosts a Notes application -- it hasn't required rebooting in over six months. It's a single CPU with 512 M of RAM. I have to admit, though, that it's pretty stripped down in terms of what tasks run, etc.

6 - Generally, mine reboot in the 1-2 month range.

~2500 users, no Notes clients...only web applications. Several servers, all Win2k, most partitioned (2-4 partitions on a box).

MS does their Patch Tuesday routine every month or so. Usually there's at least one patch every other Patch Tuesday that we either decide needs to go on the servers, or some other higher authority decides that we need it.

It's not often though that I come across an issue on my servers where I think "it's been up too long, needs a reboot." Maybe we're not generating as much traffic as I thought. One of my lower traffic servers I've had up for almost 100 days before rebooting.

I saw one server a couple years ago that was running 4.6 on NT4 and had been up for something like 380 days. Not long after that, I think they just took it offline altogether. Maybe someone just forgot it was out there.

7 - I'd have to agree with Scott on this one, we used to recycle the servers on average at least once a quarter, but because of the need for regular patching of the OS this procedure became redundant. Most of the servers would be rebooted at on average once every two months. So if you are checking , I would say at least once every 3 months.

But , it needs to be a cold boot. And if you are doing a cold boot it is advisable to monitor it.