Why does ‘turn it off and turn it on again’ work most of the time?
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Lots of software bugs have to do with memory management, where there’s a difference between what the software expects will be in RAM and what actually is there. This can happen for all sorts of reasons, most of which boil down to the humans who wrote it made some assumptions that are true most but not quite all of the time. The longer a piece of software is running the more chances there are for one of those assumptions to be wrong, and once it has gotten out of sync it usually doesn’t have the ability to notice, let alone fix the problem.
Restarting the machine forces all the software on that machine to set the memory it’s going to use up again from scratch, which usually means that it’ll be in state where the expected and actual state of that memory match again.
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