5 ms·

An addendum to this is that Windows needs to restart way too often compared to Linux. When I apply my daily yum updates for CentOS, only kernel updates, which

• Someone1234 12y ago
  Windows Server needs to restart at MOST once a month ("patch tuesday"). If I look at a 2012 Core server, it hasn't even restarted nearly that often in the past year. In fact 9 times in 12 months. Plus I can schedule this restart at any hour, on any day, I wish. And do. For example I restart mine on Thursday morning at 1 am. If that really makes Windows Server "unsuitable for servers" then your downtime requirements must be so high that any single server wouldn't be able to meet them (i.e. even with Linux you'd need two or more servers to provide that level of uptime).
  • akulbe 12y ago
    Once a month is way too often. Even if your downtime requirements are "so high", once a month is ridiculous. For the sake of this example, let's assume you have customers that depend on your server being up, for the product/service they're paying you for. Tell the customers that you plan on rebooting once a month, and see how they feel about it.
    • noblethrasher 12y ago
      A server is just a name. Just because a host machine needs to go down doesn't mean that the "server" has to go down.
    • Someone1234 12y ago
      In that scenario I'd never have just a single server, be it Linux, Windows, BSD, or anything else. Being in a situation where you're completely unable to restart a machine without losing money, is being in a situation where you're living on a knife edge regardless. A single hardware failure and you're in deep trouble. I've been in exactly that situation (the entire company rested on a single Ubuntu server), it was really unpleasant and management didn't do a thing about it until we started getting sector errors which the RAID controller's error handling was struggling to cope with (after that incident and the downtime, management shelled out for four physical boxes, a SAN, VMWare licenses, and a setup with 15 minute rollbacks and dynamic migrations if a physical server died).
      • mreiland 12y ago
        his point remains. being forced to run 2 servers so your server doesn't go down once/month is a bit ridiculous. No, it isn't untenable, yes you can work around it, but that's a problem that shouldn't need to be worked around.
        • tempestn 12y ago
          Agreed. Up to a certain point, a single server is going to be considerably more cost effective than multiple machines, as well as requiring less devOps time. (Especially nowadays when you can easily lease a server with, say, 16 cores and 48GB of RAM.) I can recall having to restart our production server exactly once in the past 12 months for a kernel update. Every month would be an irritation for sure.
        • WorldWideWayne 12y ago
          Is it normal to update server software like PostgreSQL or Redis on Linux without stopping the running process during the update? Maybe Linux doesn't need to restart the OS as often, but you're still going to have down time, right?
          • mreiland 12y ago
            You can update the software without pulling it down. In order to use the update you need to restart, but there's a large difference between restarting a service and restarting an OS. It isn't really analogous.
            • WorldWideWayne 12y ago
              It takes 10 seconds to restart Windows these days, so it's almost analagous.
              • acdha 12y ago
                Do you have any benchmarks to support that claim? I have Windows 8 and 10 systems which take minutes to reboot on an SSD which beg to differ.
    • SomeStupidPoint 12y ago
      Popular (gaming) services have weekly downtimes to patch servers, and while users are annoyed, they seem to get over it and keep playing just fine.
      • TillE 12y ago
        It's completely insane to have multi-hour downtime every week the way Blizzard does. Between that and their regionally segregated Battle.net (there's no good excuse that you can't play Hearthstone with anyone anywhere), they're basically stuck on server architectures from the 90s.
  • e40 12y ago
    Windows Server needs to restart at MOST once a month ("patch tuesday"). BUT if Windows patches came out as often as CentOS patches do, I'd been rebooting every other day.
  • tne 12y ago
    This is the approach taken by LY-Linux ("patch leap year"), although better implemented IMO. In fact, I typically only have to restart my servers once every 4 years (at most). Look it up, it's awesome. (Please don't.)
• nitramafve 12y ago
  This might be the case if you run servers on single machines rather than in clusters. And if you are running servers on single instances, aren't you already giving yourself a SPOF? If you need a specific server to be running at all times it seems like you have a problem.