I work at a major tech company and most times I go to IT, they tell us to restart our computer. Why is this a necessary process to maintain a normal operating experience?
In: 38
imperfect code typically.
If they were perfect, programs would always clean up after themselves, and let go of what they have grabbed and only take what they really need. But they’re not, so you get things that hang around, or take up too much because they keep asking for more without using what they’ve got.
Restarting just resets everything and starts with a clean slate. Like if you could clean your living room by just getting a new one.
Remember those defense missiles the U.S. had. They didn’t tell them to reset them every once in a while because the different clocks inside would get out of sync. They told the missile to go get that SCUD but…..
Primarily because MS Windows is a house of cards built upon the slopes of vesuvius, should it fail to randomly shit itself every now and again and need a restart then the very fabric of reality would sunder and release the unmade eldritch horrors from beyond the pale.
It’s a frankensteins monster of an operating system built out of a billion parts slapped together and beta tested by the general public to the lowest passing grade.
In short if you are spinning 500 plates on the end of pointy sticks then every now and again one of them will get missed and fall, normally you can pick it back up and get back to spinning but alas every now and again one will go flying off and knock a load of other plates off and by that time you might as well start the whole thing again as spend time trying to get them all up spinning again will take longer than just starting fresh.
Also the IT guys don’t know or care what’s wrong at your end and if rebooting sorts the problem they can go back to watching YouTube.
first of all – this is 90% because of crappy software. if the OS is well-behaved, a system can run (theoretically) indefinitely. the remaining 10% is software/hardware updates… but – there are systems out there, that simply cannot be turned off (for various reasons). for example IBM’s system Z (z stands for zero-downtime) is designed in such a way that hardware (not to mention software) can be replaced without the need to turn it off.
the duration of single operating system’s session is called [uptime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptime). bragging about one’s uptime was a thing (i don’t know, maybe still is). and people had some impressive results in this regard – uptimes of several years (between restarts) were not unheard of. i was able to accomplish 421 days of continuous run of single system session – it was Solaris Unix on x86 commodity hardware connected to an ordinary UPS. it would’ve ran longer – in my case, hardware simply broke. 14 months is not bad, all things considered.
[edit] that’s my RPI at the moment – nothing is wrong with it. it just runs:
bartek@malina:~ % uptime
7:28PM up 49 days, 22:34, 1 user, load averages: 0.01, 0.01, 0.00
bartek@malina:~ %
When code has been running for a long time, it can get out of whack. It could be file handles that aren’t closed, internal data structures that get slightly corrupted, software that talks to hardware (drivers) get out of sync with the hardware. All sorts of possibilities. If this code is running as an application, restarting the application would typically solve it. If the software is the operating system itself, rebooting gives it a clean slate and a known state.
Well you guys are awesome! Loving these answers
It is like cleaning off a table: bits and scraps and crumbs accumulate in the computer and you need to clear everything off and start fresh. In this case it is bits and scraps of programs and documents you were working on, things the computer was saving “in case” and updates that couldn’t install while the programs were running.
Computer software is imperfect and doesn’t always clean up after them nicely…
It’s like a desk. You start in the morning with a pristine desk, but as the day goes, mess slowly creeps in…The pencils are not in the right places anymore, there are pieces of paper laying around etc. Maybe an half-empty cup of coffee… It starts to get more difficult to work there, and the coffee poses serious risks – whole desk might crash…
A restart brings that desk to a pristine state again.
To add to what others have said, sometimes programs/drivers get into a weird state, and it is easier to tell a non-technical user to restart the computer as a whole than it is to walk them through finding and killing the offending process and relaunching it.
Sometimes programs need to restart background services. Finding those services is tedious and dull. Restarting your pc restarts those services. Saved you 3 pages of comment essays
Latest Answers