I feel like the overall direction of the software world has been aiming to maximize developer productivity -- at the expense of rock solid reliability -- for qu

I feel like the overall direction of the software world has been aiming to maximize developer productivity -- at the expense of rock solid reliability -- for quite some time now. You can think of garbage collection as being an early admittance that it's far simpler to just clean things up in bulk on a periodic basis, than it is to keep track of every resource you're allocating, and making sure that it's freed at the earliest possible time. Restarting a service after it's been running for hours, because of memory leaks, seems like a broader implementation of a similar notion... despite best efforts, sometimes services just accumulate cruft, and so long as you can properly drain clients to another server before restarting, is it really that bad to have to restart it periodically? I think of it as an extra long GC pause that frees everything up. There's a sweet spot where "good enough" really is good enough, and I don't lament it all that much.