Reboots suck

When is Microsoft going to figure out how to roll-out patches that don't require reboots? It's hard to pitch the reliability of Win 2k3 Server when you have to reboot every couple of months. It gives the Linux nuts a reason to kick sand in your face too. Granted, it pulls my sites off the air for all of two minutes, but that's two minutes too long.

The longest I went was three and a half months on my current box, no problem. Everything still appeared healthy and I didn't need to cycle any services or anything. It would've been cool to go longer.

4 Comments

  • Try comparing the time it takes to apply a patch on a Windows 2003 box and reboot it to the time it takes to install a patch on a Linux box. The Windows server reboots in less than a minute while a Linux box, if it requires rebooting has a downtime of a few minutes. People should take a look at the total length of the downtime instead of the length of the uptime, i think you'll find them quite similar :)

  • the root of this is what is beeing patched....



    *EVEN UNIX / LINUX* has to reboot if the code is used in a live running process that you can't halt.



    the windows problems are:



    1) what services to halt to unlock the dll?

    2) dlls that you can't unlock due to OS dependancy issues.



    heck the re-boots are way down from say NT 4.0 days.....



    but yea the whole OS needs to work a bit like the "rolling-restart" of an ASP.NET web site

    where a new appdomain is created and the callers on the old app domain exit and then the old domain halts.



    BUT at SOME POINT you have to reboot of you are patching the OS core.

    on any system....

  • If you can figure out how to dynamically replace any of the dlls that are being upgraded in the processes that are actively using them I'm sure Microsoft would love to see your resume. ;) I'm pretty sure this is technically possible, but I don't think the OS supports it today.



    So with that in mind, you'd have to at least cycle all the processes on the machine in order to ensure that all processes are using the latest versions of whatever dlls were updated. In that case, it sounds like a reboot would be easier to me. :)

  • Hey... I didn't say I knew how, or even care how. It's just something I want as a customer. Customers are allowed to comlpain, right?

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