[NTLUG:Discuss] Uptimes

[Steve Baker]

Greg Edwards wrote:
> 
> Just wanted to pass along some numbers that M$ would love to be able to
> brag about:)  I've got 3 systems, 1 workstation and 2 servers, that I'll
> be doing an upgrade to next week so my uptimes will get reset.  All 3 of
> these are running Mandrake 7.1 and I'll be going to Mandrake 8.0.
> 
>   Athlon K7 Workstation   7:28pm  up 188 days,  3:37
>   Cyrix PR200 Web server  7:29pm  up 62 days, 20:37
>   AMD K6-2 Network server 7:30pm  up 226 days, 20:45
> 
> The Web server had a memory upgrade that was done 2 months ago,
> otherwise it would be in the same extended uptime as the others.

Those are pretty good times - I've seen similar (although the lack
of an UPS on our systems tends to limit their uptimes to a couple
of months).

What I find most impressive is not so much server uptimes but desktop machines
used for software development.  A server runs a relatively small range
of packages in a fairly repetitive way - and hence the individual programs
tend to be reliable and don't stress the OS too much.

But when you see a machine that's been used for developing software with
an uptime in the hundred day plus mark, that's more impressive because
the OS has had to tolerate programs crashing and generally misbehaving
in a wide range of "creative" ways.  Back in the bad old days when I
worked with people who had to develop under NT, a flakey program would
have about a 50:50 chance of taking the OS down with it - or even worse,
making the system liable to crash halfware through the next edit/compile
cycle.

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