[kupan787]

My roommate and I were having a discussion today about restarting and how it effects system performance. I have a Mac (running Panther) and he has a PC (he runs XP Pro). He shuts off his computer every night, while I just put mine to sleep. He was trying to argue telling me that I should shut down my computer rather then putting it to sleep so the memory gets cleared out and things will run faster. I wasn't buying this. My argument was that if something is in memory, next time I go to launch it it will load faster, as it doesn't have to load the instance into memory as it is already there.

So I guess I am wondering who is right on this one, me or my roommate? And does XP handle things differently than OS X ith respect to memory, so that maybe we could both be correct?

[entrox]

Unless you have running apps which constantly leak memory, you are right.

[msuper69]

The reason he shuts down his XP machine instead of putting it to sleep is most likely because it either won't wake up from sleep or it takes too long to wake up. So naturally he is going to say shutting down is better (but very 20th century).

[larkost]

Cleaning out memory is a silly reason to restart/shutdown a computer. Windows checks memory once a second, and MacOS X does it the unix way (check when you need/use it). In both cases memory should not need to "cleaned" out this way, ever.

As entrox said, memory leaks can change this. On Windows you have a lot of bad software... think of all the spyware and viruses, which could be the source of leaks. Plus you have a web-browser with major hooks through kernel space (a very complicated move that gets some extra speed, with major complexity costs... the source of many potential problems).

With a strait WinXP install you should be able to go for long periods without restarting, but in practice this length keeps getting shorter and shorter, and re-installing is a real pain.

On MacOS X there is a smaller chance of software pulling trick like this. The only areas where this would be an issue are in drivers and daemons. Of those two the drivers are the think to worry about, but I have not yet seen a really bad driver (except the Epson drivers, but they don't leak memory, just loose contact from time to time).

[kupan787]

Originally posted by entrox:
Unless you have running apps which constantly leak memory, you are right.

Ok, I figured as much.

Its funny, because the other day he was using my laptop, which at the time had an uptime of 38 days. I forgot to plug it in one night when the battery was low, so the machine ended up shutting down. He went to use it after starting it up and said basicly "see, the machine is running faster, and so is the internet since you restarted yoru comptuer". I knew the internet speed wouldn't be at all affected by my machines RAM, so at that point I figured the whole thing is perceived...

[msuper69]

Originally posted by kupan787:

... He went to use it after starting it up and said basicly "see, the machine is running faster, and so is the internet since you restarted yoru comptuer"....

I wish I had that kind of world control. Now THAT is funny.