[vox] [fwd] [svlug] mission critical computing and air safety

[Ken Bloom]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 12:48:34PM -0700, Mark K. Kim wrote:
> Unfortunately, you can't stop & restart processes like daemons on
> Windows as easily as you can on Linux or UNIX.  If the daemons have
> problems, you're stuck and have very little choice but to restart
> the whole system.

Well, assuming you still have the RAM to work with the GUI, you can go
to the services management panel and restart the service there. If
you're administering by anything that uses a command line (assuming
such a thing is possible), then use the net command, specifically "net
stop ServiceName" "net start ServiceName".

Am I missing some practical limitation to this?

> But leaky daemons is a problem with UNIX & co as well as Windows.
> UNIX is not leak-proof... just imaging going through all the daemons
> and restarting them one-by-one to find the daemon with leaky memory!
> -- might as well just reboot...

One word: top

And how long do our mission critical servers usually last on Linux?
Much longer than 49.7 days. (Although I probably concur with Rob
Rodgers' opinion that it's the clock. When I first read it, I assumed
it was some kind of open file limit, and that the application was
leaking file handles.)

> Last time I was at UCD, both the CS and the EE departments regularly
> rebooted their computers -- Linux, HPUX, Sun, SGI, etc.  Of course,
> this is all done automatically, and the EE department had the
> sensibility to reboot only if nobody's logged into the system.

They still do.

> On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Ken Bloom wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 12:04:17PM -0700, Rod Roark wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 22 September 2004 11:36 am, Tim Riley wrote:
> > >
> > > In general, the OS has no way to know when memory is in use
> > > by mistake (while the app is still running).  Regardless of
> > > whether a platform performs garbage collection (e.g. Java),
> > > it's not only possible but common for memory leaks to occur.
> > >
> > > > Should a person
> > > > have to reboot a computer every month to reset leaked memory?
> > >
> > > Of course not.  It's embarrassing.
> >
> > I would think that Windows, like Linux would free up all leaked memory
> > when the application terminated, and that it should be sufficient to
> > restart the application, rather than restarting the whole computer.
> >
> > Am I wrong about this?
> >
> > --Ken Bloom
> >
> > --
> > I usually have a GPG digital signature included as an attachment.
> > See http://www.gnupg.org/ for info about these digital signatures.
> >
> > G'mar Chatima Tova
> >
> 
> -- 
> Mark K. Kim
> AIM: markus kimius
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-- 
I usually have a GPG digital signature included as an attachment.
See http://www.gnupg.org/ for info about these digital signatures.

G'mar Chatima Tova
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