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Anand · Jan 24, 2003, 08:56 PM

I just noticed on resexcellence a bit about someones amazing long uptime of 77 days with OS X. Is this strange? Our lab eMac is close to 100 days and never a problem. The only reason that its gone that long is that I have forgotten to update the darn thing. This probably has been discussed in detail so I don't want to start some stupid uptime thread but OS X has been so stable for me on desktops that we never shut them down. In fact, when we get a freeze it is almost a reason for all our IT people to come and see if it is real! For all our complaining, OS X really is an amazing OS.

Xeo · Jan 24, 2003, 10:28 PM

Originally posted by Anand:
I just noticed on resexcellence a bit about someones amazing long uptime of 77 days with OS X. Is this strange? Our lab eMac is close to 100 days and never a problem.

It's only strange because, like you hinted, most tend to update each time Apple releases, and it's never that long between updates.

OS X can easily stay up for months at a time, but we, as users, just don't do that without trying. Especially those who are always on the cutting edge (virtually everyone on these forums, for example).

wataru · Jan 24, 2003, 10:36 PM

I always get too many pageouts after a while and reboot to stop the HD grinding. I have 512MB RAM.

I used to keep track of my uptime, and got up to over a month once, but then something weird happened and it said my longest uptime was like 1000+ days. I gave up after that.

Anand · Jan 24, 2003, 10:54 PM

i don't really think much about my uptime but after looking at that resexcellence site I took a look at some of our lab machines. These get used alot by a whole group of people. Most have uptimes of between 12-40 days with the one emac (that I forgot about) at 97 days. For what its worth, I maintain all computers in our center -there are about 20 PC running Windows 95/98, NT and 2000 and 30 Macs running anything from OS 7.5 to 10.2.3. And yes, the macs get very little attention.

Don Pickett · Jan 25, 2003, 01:29 AM

My current uptime is 8 days. I could probably have much more, but it seems my uptime always gets nuked when I say, "hmmm, I wonder what would happen it I try this. . ."

proton · Jan 25, 2003, 08:50 AM

My record is 126 days, 23:19.

That's on an iMac DV SE 500 (Summer 2000), running 10.1.5. The reboot was to update to 10.2, sometime in November.

And that was on a desktop machine that got a lot of use. Got to love stability

- proton

Peter · Jan 25, 2003, 09:14 AM

mine would be about a month, but then a system update, software update requires a restart and kills my uptime. Sometimes my battery dies in sleep when I am out travelling, but who am I to complain? my record on a windows xp was two days before it crashed to a halt...

Drizzt · Jan 25, 2003, 09:29 AM

I'm getting poor uptime on my PowerBook G4, the logout kernel panic bug..

Still, I'm shure with 10.2.4 I'll get a better uptime than my Windows XP Job Supplied P4m 1.8Ghz Laptop. It allreay crashed twice this weekend

webb3201 · Jan 25, 2003, 11:37 AM

my current machines and uptime"

iMac 800 45 days (and needs update to 10.2.3.

Ti667 DVI - 8 days

Powermac g3 350 -135 days and in need of a restart for updates

andreas_g4 · Jan 25, 2003, 11:40 AM

Sad but true, my uptime never raises to more than 2-3 days, since Deus Ex runs much faster in OS 9 than in classic...

biscool · Jan 25, 2003, 11:56 AM

My uptime always dies when I install an update or a program. I cant believe it when a non-os update app requires me to restart. For example I installed divx 5 aplha 3 the other day and it made me restart. Actually the installer said it recommended a restart but never said it was going to restart, imagine my surrpise when I click quit on the installer, my computer restarted...

EmAn · Jan 25, 2003, 02:00 PM

My record's 42 days.

marky_boy · Jan 25, 2003, 03:57 PM

i had a quicktime streaming server in a data centre in HK (im in melbourne, australia). running on a G4 cube, 10.0.x Server....uptime? 346 days before it got switched off and decomissioned (spewing it didnt go a year

).

It constantly served streams and load averages were always 1.6+

when the network guys have a go at me at work, i just print them a screencap with an uptime report

Peter · Jan 25, 2003, 04:05 PM

346 days is pretty damn impressive

but I guess servers are always on so ...

Drizzt · Jan 25, 2003, 04:11 PM

Originally posted by PeterClark2002:
346 days is pretty damn impressive but I guess servers are always on so ...

I nearly never get more than 90days with Linux and Windows NT 4.. so 346days is really freaking good

Moose · Jan 25, 2003, 10:00 PM

Originally posted by Drizzt:
I nearly never get more than 90days with Linux and Windows NT 4.. so 346days is really freaking good

22:58:22 up 401 days, 23:26, 27 users, load average: 0.02, 0.05, 0.01

Linux [hostname] 2.4.16 #1 Wed Dec 19 18:28:36 EST 2001 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux

Not that I actually sanction the use of Linux. Just the box with the highest uptime I can find right now.

juanvaldes · Jan 25, 2003, 10:39 PM

Originally posted by Xeo:
It's only strange because, like you hinted, most tend to update each time Apple releases, and it's never that long between updates.

OS X can easily stay up for months at a time, but we, as users, just don't do that without trying. Especially those who are always on the cutting edge (virtually everyone on these forums, for example).

exactly. After I got home from break and setup my box and the linux box I was just keeping them up for as long as they would stay up. So I put off the QT update until I had a power outage a few days ago. I was at 3 weeks but will never pass 4 weeks as I need my computer for our monthly LAN party

IUJHJSDHE · Jan 26, 2003, 08:56 AM

Originally posted by Xeo:
most tend to update each time Apple releases

I never do that, many things have gone wrong with updating the second the update is out.

Remember that itunes update that was screwing up hard drives or something, I don't remember the problem

it's a good idea to wait for the comments on the update first.

Agent69 · Jan 26, 2003, 11:27 AM

Originally posted by Anand:
I just noticed on resexcellence a bit about someones amazing long uptime of 77 days with OS X. Is this strange?

I recently posted about that screenshot in the iBook forum. What's most impressive is that the iBook was never turned off in all that time, only put to sleep. According to the writeup, he traveled "from Kansas to Texas to Florida" with it that way.

Personally, Mac OS X's wakeup time is so fast that I am surprised that anyone actually shuts down their machine all the way.

Anomalous · Jan 26, 2003, 12:25 PM

I posted a thread about uptime a while ago but no one seemed interested in it. My record is 25 days, 2 hours, 31 minutes.

darcybaston · Jan 26, 2003, 02:01 PM

I'd be more interested in hearing how many crashes/freezes/kernel panics you guys had in all of 2002 with OS X?

I'm happy to say that in a full year of use, I only had 1 panic and two freezes. And the freezes were from games that wouldn't let me quit/force quit/task switch so I had to manually restart by pressing and holding the power button on my 99' iMac DV SE.

Drizzt · Jan 26, 2003, 02:02 PM

Originally posted by darcybaston:
I'd be more interested in hearing how many crashes/freezes/kernel panics you guys had in all of 2002 with OS X?

I'm happy to say that in a full year of use, I only had 1 panic and two freezes. And the freezes were from games that wouldn't let me quit/force quit/task switch so I had to manually restart by pressing and holding the power button on my 99' iMac DV SE.

I'd say 2-3 KP on my iBook and 1 on my Ti400 bought the 31st of December

Cadaver · Jan 26, 2003, 02:11 PM

My longest has been 27 days, but I always end up either updating the OS or installing a piece of software that wants the machine rebooted, or turning off the power to muck around on the inside (swapping hard drives, etc). I have no doubt it would run longer, but I always end up doing something that requires me to take down the machine...

On my Windows machine at work, however, I never power it down, nor to I ever open it up. It's longest run time, however, has been about a week since it seems there are continuous MS Windows updates that need to be installed. I think that's how MS claims such reliability - the machine is constantly being rebooted by software updates

Anand · Jan 26, 2003, 02:27 PM

"I posted a thread about uptime a while ago but no one seemed interested in it. My record is 25 days, 2 hours, 31 minutes."

And I almost agree. I mean, talking about uptime is like talking about how big your ... is.

What amazes me is that I have gotten so used to OS X, that something like uptime, is taken for granted. OS 9 was fine but is was not stable. Anything could bring it down. I used to have 2-3 forced reboots per week. My windows 98 machine was similar (much better at the start but worse as time passed).

We all complain about OS X, it does not have this, or can't do that. What we forget is that it is already one hell of a OS. Window XP is good. Actually it is very good and would make most people happy. OS X is better. The problam is that no one outside of the Mac community even knows about X for that fact to mean anything.

K-Bat · Jan 26, 2003, 03:23 PM

I have a question for those who have more than 3 or 4 days of uptime and are using Macs not just as servers but as working machines. How are you coping with the eventual build up of swap files? I had 20 or so swap files when I checked the vm directory after some Photoshop and film scanning work, and saw a large figure for pageouts in top command. Is the virtual memory management in OSX so efficient that a large number of swap files/pageouts don't negatively affect the performance? I have 1GB of RAM in my 1GB PB.

moki · Jan 26, 2003, 03:57 PM

Originally posted by Anand:
I just noticed on resexcellence a bit about someones amazing long uptime of 77 days with OS X. Is this strange? Our lab eMac is close to 100 days and never a problem.

Not strange at all -- our web server that handles a pretty good amount of traffic (which runs Mac OS X server 10.1.4 -- essentially just Mac OS X with some admin tools) -- was up for well over 140 days, then I had to reboot it to install some security patches. Ah well.

Xeo · Jan 26, 2003, 04:42 PM

I would never be happy not running the latest and greatest on my system. My uptime will never be longer than the time between Apple's updates. Of course, it's usually much less than that since I tend to restart for various reasons every now and then. Neither my desktop nor my laptop get any cold time, though.

Don Pickett · Jan 26, 2003, 07:30 PM

Originally posted by K-Bat:
I have a question for those who have more than 3 or 4 days of uptime and are using Macs not just as servers but as working machines. How are you coping with the eventual build up of swap files? I had 20 or so swap files when I checked the vm directory after some Photoshop and film scanning work, and saw a large figure for pageouts in top command. Is the virtual memory management in OSX so efficient that a large number of swap files/pageouts don't negatively affect the performance? I have 1GB of RAM in my 1GB PB.

After ten days uf uptime, with a lot of heavy use - Classic, Acrobat, Photoshop - I have only 2153 pageouts and only one swap file. We'll see what happens as my uptime goes up, assuming it does.

Piismo 500, 1 GB RAM

tooki · Jan 26, 2003, 07:46 PM

There are rumors that some NeXT computers (on NeXT hardware) were never rebooted after being set up, supposedly resulting in some uptime of over 7 years before being decommissioned.

(Of course, mainframes from the 70s and 80s often ran uninterrupted from the day they were installed to the day they were dismantled.)

tooki

chris v · Jan 26, 2003, 09:49 PM

The longest I've gotten is 31 days. I'd say a good average uptime for me is 15 - 20 days.

My Cube spontaneously shuts down once in a blue moon, but has been rock solid under 10.2. I think it's frozen on me 2 or 3 times since October, and two weeks ago, I had all my apps dissapear, so I had to boot 9 to run DiskWarrior. No KP's since 10.1.3.

I've had one KP in 10.2 on my dual gig, which didn't otherwise even hiccup between when I bought it in May and sometime around November.

While some people look at this kind of topic as so much macho posturing, I look back at my OS 9 days and sigh a great big sigh of relief. (Funny, though the best uptime ever for any of my machines was 64 days in OS 8.1)

CV