Exactly how often do servers restart? Your average commodity server - maybe twice a year. For user data it's too much, but for user statuses, I don't think so.

Exactly how often do servers restart? Your average commodity server - maybe twice a year. For user data it's too much, but for user statuses, I don't think so. And if you save the data in a controlled restart and only consider crashes, with a bit of effort you can probably go down to about once every couple of years or less. As for the benefit... there was a picture some time back here on HN: http://imgur.com/X1Hi1.gif http://imgur.com/X1Hi1.gif