Ask HN: What's Your Uptime? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's Your Uptime?

5 pointsmichaelteter10 comments

Informal survey: on your primary machine, what is the uptime? And what apps do you typically keep open?

For me, M1 Macbook Air 2021, 16GB RAM. JetBrains IDEs, Firefox, Chrome, and miscellaneous other apps.

19:22 up 109 days, 14:24, 7 users, load averages: 2.75 2.67 2.76

Side note - this laptop has been on 4 continents since last reboot.

Currently, I have:

  14:37:25 up 129 days, 21:43,  1 user,  load average: 0.32, 0.13, 0.07

I keep many xterms open, and the IRC client usually also. The web browser is sometimes open. (There are also the background programs such as the SMTP server, HTTP server, NNTP server, etc.)

I only turn on my machine when I'm using it. My only real metric is how long my machine manages to boot into an OS. So far, no drives have failed, the PC manages to boot and has done for 10 years now. Obviously when that changes, I'll just buy a new laptop.

I remember these old days when people didn't update kernels on their systems and boasted of high uptime on their private servers. Like high uptime would be an indicator of good maintenance ;)

In the age of clustering software are there still admins that are proud of their high uptimes?

In this case, I was referring to personal use (or development) machines. High uptime could indeed mean that someone has neglecting important updates, but it can also mean a stable system where updates do not require reboots.

Clearly the intent of my post was missed by many, so whatever.

Servers / Routers / Firewalls: Never more than 2 weeks to uptake new kernels. I am personally not a fan of live kernel patching for my own things as there could be a landmine not tested by a reboot and hardware issues that a new POST would catch.

Workstations / Laptops: Never more than 1 day. I power down everything at night including layer 2 switches, inverters, the works.

If you do software development, how do you maintain context? I often have terminals open with useful history and logs, plus one or more IDEs, and of course plenty of browser tabs.

If I walk up to my machine after a long weekend, within 10 seconds I know where I left off because I can see what I had open and what I was working on.

Rebooting daily would require me to develop some additional kind of state management system (not that it would be a bad thing to learn).

I don't do much coding but if I did I would commit my work and make notes in a text file of what I was doing in a TO-DO list of sorts. I have a shell function for taking and reading notes with date/time-stamps. In my former life those notes were in Jira.

I used to reside in California in a place with very unstable power so I got into the habit of taking notes and committing often. PG&E the power company would shut off the power any time it got windy.

Didn’t realize this was the 90s again.

What point are you making?

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