4 ms·

Whats with this kneejerk advice? Honestly who turns off their macs? Are they talking about sleep mode?

imdsm 7y ago
I had an issue recently with Virtualbox which caused my iMac Pro to crash and power cycle. That, as well as certain Xcode updates (required by other software), meant I lost my 200+ days of workstation uptime.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  > meant I lost my 200+ days of workstation uptime. So nothing was lost except a world record?
- pdimitar 7y ago
  Do you have any idea how exactly did VirtualBox crash your iMac Pro? I’m pondering installing it on mine and your comment is scary.
valerij 7y ago
i, as an app developer, have to reboot my mac atleast two times the week to get xcode back into a working state. not to sound like a jerk, but if you dont have to powercycle you prob not pushing your machine far enough
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Or running stable software that locks up less? Maybe Xcode is just badly written?
  - donedealomg 7y ago
    why `maybe` XCode's codebase is a mess
  - valerij 7y ago
    any sufficiently complicated software can reach a state where problems arise. you just need to push it far enough. e.g. i have the swift compiler giving up every few weeks because i feed it code that crashes its internal constrain-solver. good thing is, submitting such code samples i can contribute to its improvement. i believe everyone has a tale of some software exhibiting strange behaviour, ive seen it all: adobe products crashing when you exit them, broken text rendering in firefox until a restart, hell, i even had the windows' LogonUI.exe hang on me. the point is: consider a software to be a state machine. since we stopped formally verifying correctness of our programs, it is in the realm of possible for each program to reach a state where its behaviour is undesired and there is no easy path to move it to a more stable state.
swebs 7y ago
Don't you have to still reboot Macs to apply certain updates?
- magashna 7y ago
  You do. OP sounds like a typical end user. Waits a year to reboot and then gets mad that updates take an hour to download and install.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- savoytruffle 7y ago
  It used to be you almost always had to reboot to update the Safari web browser, but interestingly this week's version 13, at least on macOS Mojave, did not require a restart.
fortran77 7y ago
I remember back in the day when every "creative type" doing anything on a Mac would reboot before starting a new big Photoshop or Illustrator project. This was before Macs had memory protection and one process could stomp on another processes' memory if there was a wild pointer. After running any large application for a while, before starting a different one, it was standard practice to reboot.
bigwheeler 7y ago
I do after I notice it starting to get really slow, but I always check uptime in terminal before I do. Just happened last night, after 62 days of running!
tom_ 7y ago
I reboot once every week or two - there's always something that fucks up when you leave it running for a month or more. Or if I ever go through and quit everything (for whatever reason), I usually reboot then. It won't hurt, and it doesn't take long. It's worth doing fairly regularly to at least check the process still works as you expect. At some point you'll actually have to restart your PC, and the last thing you want is to be surprised by some problem or other. (OK, so I've never had any serious rebooting problem with OS X, but I have had a reboot show up stuff missing from launchctl and the login items, the sort of thing that's an outsize pain to fix when you were in the middle of something.)

I had an issue recently with Virtualbox which caused my iMac Pro to crash and power cycle. That, as well as certain Xcode updates (required by other software), meant I lost my 200+ days of workstation uptime.

rolltiide 7y ago
> meant I lost my 200+ days of workstation uptime. So nothing was lost except a world record?
pdimitar 7y ago
Do you have any idea how exactly did VirtualBox crash your iMac Pro? I’m pondering installing it on mine and your comment is scary.

valerij 7y ago

i, as an app developer, have to reboot my mac atleast two times the week to get xcode back into a working state. not to sound like a jerk, but if you dont have to powercycle you prob not pushing your machine far enough

michaelmrose 7y ago
Or running stable software that locks up less? Maybe Xcode is just badly written?
- donedealomg 7y ago
  why `maybe` XCode's codebase is a mess
- valerij 7y ago
  any sufficiently complicated software can reach a state where problems arise. you just need to push it far enough. e.g. i have the swift compiler giving up every few weeks because i feed it code that crashes its internal constrain-solver. good thing is, submitting such code samples i can contribute to its improvement. i believe everyone has a tale of some software exhibiting strange behaviour, ive seen it all: adobe products crashing when you exit them, broken text rendering in firefox until a restart, hell, i even had the windows' LogonUI.exe hang on me. the point is: consider a software to be a state machine. since we stopped formally verifying correctness of our programs, it is in the realm of possible for each program to reach a state where its behaviour is undesired and there is no easy path to move it to a more stable state.

swebs 7y ago

Don't you have to still reboot Macs to apply certain updates?

magashna 7y ago
You do. OP sounds like a typical end user. Waits a year to reboot and then gets mad that updates take an hour to download and install.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
savoytruffle 7y ago
It used to be you almost always had to reboot to update the Safari web browser, but interestingly this week's version 13, at least on macOS Mojave, did not require a restart.

fortran77 7y ago

I remember back in the day when every "creative type" doing anything on a Mac would reboot before starting a new big Photoshop or Illustrator project. This was before Macs had memory protection and one process could stomp on another processes' memory if there was a wild pointer. After running any large application for a while, before starting a different one, it was standard practice to reboot.

bigwheeler 7y ago

I do after I notice it starting to get really slow, but I always check uptime in terminal before I do. Just happened last night, after 62 days of running!

tom_ 7y ago

I reboot once every week or two - there's always something that fucks up when you leave it running for a month or more. Or if I ever go through and quit everything (for whatever reason), I usually reboot then. It won't hurt, and it doesn't take long. It's worth doing fairly regularly to at least check the process still works as you expect. At some point you'll actually have to restart your PC, and the last thing you want is to be surprised by some problem or other. (OK, so I've never had any serious rebooting problem with OS X, but I have had a reboot show up stuff missing from launchctl and the login items, the sort of thing that's an outsize pain to fix when you were in the middle of something.)